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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


PRINCETON, N. J. 


PRESENTED BY 


bt. ARE eae Smith DD. 


BX 8066 .K65 W3 1924 
Krumbine, Miles Henry, 1891 
The way to the best 





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THE WAY TO THE BEST 
MILES H. KRUMBINE 





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MILES H. KRUMBINE 


PASTOR OF THE FIRST LUTHERAN CHURCH, DAYTON, OHIO 


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GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


FOREWORD 


Two of the sermons included in this volume were 
preached in Leon Mandel Hall, the University of Chi- 
cago. They are “A New Apostolate” and “The Ade- 
quate Witness.” The sermon entitled “Sources of 
Personal Power” appeared in The Christian Herald 
under the title “Transformed by the Spirit” and is here 
used by permission. I am grateful to the editor of The 
Century Magazine for permission to use the concluding 
essay, ““A Famine of Prophets,” which appeared in that 
magazine February, 1922. The other sermons were all 
preached in the pulpit of the First Lutheran Church, 
Dayton, Ohio, 


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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
ETH WAY TOMDR EV BES Tn pie Cho rs tii! cyte II 
AIMRTESUS £ BIRSTISERMON  Ailescsehinlca it iconth wnat tea 21 
MUPPET AE ADEQUATE WITNESS i iia) be ut bie 35 
IV SIN AND THE MODERN MAN... . 50 
V HOW JESUS HELPS USIN TEMPTATION. . 65 
VI THE VALUEOFTHEGOODLIFE. .. . 82 
VII SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER . .. . 94 
Viti PIN DING GODLU NBEAL init cu ei hear) eas LOS 
IX JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION . . 118 
Mn CHRISTIANITY (AND SER Maki Ue chien cau nt LO 
KSA NEW) APOSTOLATENc 1 atihne imemhinen sii vem 43 


MIP VASEAMINE OF PROPHETS Vy suites esse £56 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


I 
PELE W AY COPTER BEST 


St. Matthew 5:20 “For I say unto you, that except 
your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness 
of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall m no wise 
enter wmto the kingdom of heaven.” 


| (stale had no personal quarrel with the scribes and 

Pharisees. Their righteousness was inadequate but 
not because He condemned it. He condemned it be- 
cause it failed of its aim, to bring men and women 
to the best. Such moral incentives as they offered 
were mere mechanical devices for the manufacture 
of badges of honor to be worn externally. There was 
an utter lack of animation and spirit which might issue 
in deeds of righteousness. When quite a young man 
Benjamin Franklin conceived the idea of cataloguing 
the virtues. He found them to be thirteen in number. 
He then undertook the practice of one virtue a week, 
exclusively, thus covering the whole realm of good- 
ness once every quarter. The device had logic on its 
side. It was simple and efficient. At the end of a 
year he ought to be a very virtuous man indeed. Need- 


[11] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


less to say our youthful adventurer soon abandoned his 
mechanical device for the achievement of virtue. It 
did not bring him to the best. It was, as a matter of 
fact, an exact reproduction of the ancient scribal and 
Pharisaic mode for attaining righteousness. 

The kingdom of heaven is the realm of the best. 
The spirit of Jesus, dramatically set forth in the Ser- | 
mon on the Mount, is the only sure guide to it. Jesus 
knew what was in man. He knew that men and women > 
want the best. “It is hard for me to understand,” 
wrote Richard Watson Gilder to a settlement worker, 
“a nature craven enough to be willing to put up in this 
life with anything but the best, the most noble, the 
absolutely perfect, the spiritually highest. The per- 
son who says, ‘I am content with the shadows of things, 
the shams, the less fine, the impure,’ is like one who 
would say, ‘I do not like clean bread and meat, give me 
swill.’ Every man is inescapably the guardian of his 
soul. That is his first duty in the world, to keep his 
soul clean. If he betrays his trust, he is not only a 
cowardly deserter, but he cannot escape by his default 
from impairing other souls.” The Master’s obvious 
aim is to dispel the illusion that scribal righteousness 
brings one to the best. The burden of His message 
is to furnish His friends an incentive, a motive, a guide 
to the best. His first stroke was to induce in their 
souls a deep and comprehensive desire for a righteous- 
ness that exceeds both in scope and in meaning the 
righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. 

Lord Haldane in an address to the students of the 
University of Bristol struck off a phrase worth treasur- 


[12] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


ing—‘‘cultivate a passion for excellence.” That is the 
first step on the way to the best. “That is the most 
delicious feeling of all,” remarked the youthful friend 
of Hazlitt “to like what is excellent.’ A general pas- 
sion for excellence, for a righteousness exceeding that 
of the scribes and Pharisees, will look after the me- 
chanics of conduct. For the best is not an act of 
conduct but a way of living. Goodness is not an 
achievement but a trend of character. Professor John 
Dewey has convincingly pointed out that “the bad man 
is the man who no matter how good he has been is 
beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good 
man is the man who no matter how moraily unworthy 
he has been is moving to become better.” The best is 
then to each one the discovered good, as Dewey else- 
where says. The tears of Magdalene and the gifts of 
Zaccheus are the first sign posts on the way to the best. 
They are outward symbols of an inner trend. 


I 


The righteousness that is more excellent involves 
first of all a way of thinking. It is not too much to 
say that the passages immediately following the words 
of the text point to a practical process by which the 
best is reached. They-set in contrast the old way “ye 
have heard that it was said by them of old time” and 
the new “but I say unto you.” They turn the attention 
from the external act to the inner attitude. The right- 
eousness of the scribes and Pharisees abstained from 
murder ; the more excellent righteousness restrains hate. 


[13] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


The old way. abhorred adultery, the new way cultivates 
the sweetened imagination. Always the emphasis is 
clear. The way to the best is, first of all, to think the 
best. 

With telling insight the poet puts in the mouth of 
Guinevere these very revealing words: 


“For what is true repentance but in thought— 
Not ev’n in inmost thought to think again 
The sins that made the past so pleasant to us.” 


St. Paul, in his catalogue of “golden whatsoevers,” 
analyzes the best in the spectrum of his own character, 
into its several elements: ‘‘Whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are 
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are 
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report.” Then 
by one of those swift phrases so characteristic of him 
he flashes a great light on the way to the best: “Think 
on these things.” 
Consider, for a moment, its opposite. What happens 
when you think the worst. A distinguished Scotch 
preacher has told us recently of a friend who stood 
at the top in his field of endeavor. He was learned, 
widely known and widely read. His scholarship and 
stability roused high expectations among his friends. 
Suddenly, when past forty, he went down in an excep- 
tionally shameful moral disaster. His collapse was 
complete. He had to flee the country for shame. In 
a short while he was dead. The whole depressing 
affair was a mystery, until his effects were gone into. 
Among them were found several cupboards whose 


[14] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


shelves were laden with indecent, erotic French plays 
and novels. He thought the worst and so he came 
to the worst. 

To hold the mind in the presence of the best is more 
than a pious platitude. Burne Jones assures us that 
“if there had been one cast from an ancient Greek 
sculpture, or one faithful copy of a great Italian picture 
to be seen in Birmingham when I was a boy, I should 
have begun to paint ten years before I did.” The 
amazing career of that infant prodigy, Winifred Sack- 
ville Stoner, is the story of a wise mother persistently 
holding a child’s mind in the presence of the best. The 
best pictures, the best stories, the best songs, were 
her daily fare, and so she came to the best. Great 
souls do not grow from mean thoughts; men do not 
gather figs from thistles. ‘‘As a man thinketh in his 
heart so is he.”’ 

This brings us face to face with the difficult ques- 
tion of evil intruders in the thought life. Fortunate 
is that person who finds no satanic thoughts in his 
mental furnishings! Most of us find ourselves con- 
stantly annoyed by their unwanted presence. Luther’s 
homely figure is still a classic on this point: ‘You 
can’t prevent the birds from flying over your head 
but you can prevent them from building nests in your 
hair.” Moreover, persistent thinking of the best 
weakens the capacity to think the worst. There is an 
attractive story of a young student who suddenly took 
a fancy to lewd pictures. The walls of his room were 
soon a gallery of suggestive prints. A friend came 
upon him and was dismayed. His heart was full of 


[15] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


solicitude for the student. He planned a counter cam- 
paign. He sent a few of Angelico’s pictures of serene 
and holy angels, remarking as he did so “I guess that 
will drive the actresses out.” And it did. How true 
it is that 


“Memory is a capricious wretch, 
She husbands bits of rag and straw 
And throws her jewels out the window. 


But the will of man can choose the objects of memory’s 
fancy. To think the best is the first step toward the 
best. 


II 


St. Paul rallies us not only to think the best but to 
do the best. No one saw more clearly than he how 
excessive meditation upon the best, too elaborate specu- 
lation about spiritual things usually militates against 
the realization of the best and against true spirituality. 
Wherefore he “commands” the Thessalonians to earn 
their own living and a little more for those who may 
be in need. So too does he urge the Philippians not 
only to “think on these things” but also to do them— 
“these things do.” 

The enemy of the best is not the worst. It is the 
second best. Our choice is never between what is defi- 
nitely the very noblest and what is just as definitely the 
very lowest. The choice is always between the best 
and a slightly lesser good. “Sometimes the evil of 
the loss of the higher good,” says Augustine, ‘is not 


[16] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


felt through the possession of the lower good.” Even 
the flight of Satan from heaven to hell’s dark shore 
was marked by stages of descent. Lot forsook the 
wholesome company of his uncle Abraham but he did 
not at once move to Sodom. He “‘pitched his tent 
toward Sodom.” Nehemiah excelled because he re- 
fused to yield to the current standard of morality. It 
was a lax standard of mediocre ideals. He proudly 
challenged it. ‘So did not I because of the fear of 
Jehovah.” The wistful plea of Jesus turns on this 
effort to get the folks of his day to overcome their 
guilty loyalty to the Mosaic, the conventional, code and 
adopt the best, the Christian code. His code grew 
from within outward. It obeyed an inner prompting 
rather than an outer prodding. Ultimately one can 
perhaps be sure one is doing the best only when one 
feels the claims of the inner voice more strongly than 
the suggestions of the social conventions. 

“Moral progress, has in point of fact only been 
brought about,” so Hastings Rashdall assures us, “by 
the acts of individual men and women who have had the 
courage to condemn, to go beyond, and to defy the 

existing code of public opinion at a given time and 
place.” Jesus is of course the best example. Many 
names leap to remembrance. At the beginning of 
every era of advancement is a cross, a stake or a prison 
cell marking the place where the best was done, the 
second best condemned. The redeeming power of the 
Christ is just this power to evoke loyalty to the stand- 
ard revealed in Him, loyalty that is steadfast at any 
cost. The very future of Christian civilization lies in 


[17] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


the lives of those who can live creatively, who can 
condemn the current code by transcending it. The 
future will be won on the field of moral honor more 
than in the class room of mental combat. Christian- 
ity is not primarily a thing to be studied but a deed to be 
done. Christ is not chiefly a teacher to be honored 
but a master to be followed. To be followed by im- 
plicit obedience to those flashes of inner vision, insight, 
that come to all who take Him seriously. This it is 
at last to do the best. It is not a book of rules but 
a rule of loyalty that we find in Him, loyalty up to the 
level of our powers and our best lights. In that com- 
bination of thinking and doing we find ourselves on the 
way to the best. 


IIT 


A friend of mine loves to point out that every great 
man has had either a great friend, a great teacher, or 
a great mother. He means to say that the way to the 
best is personally conducted. The popular definition of 
a university in a former day was “Mark Hopkins at 
the other end of a log.” Given a guide you may expect 
to be conducted to the best. Every thinking Britisher 
felt bigger and better as he read Sir James Barrie’s 
rectorial address on “Courage.’”’ A great guide led 
Britain through the dark passage of disillusionment to 
the place where it is light. The response in heightened 
moral was magnificent. Has not Jesus been reported 
as saying that a certain spirit should come, another 
Comforter, whose chief office it should be to ‘‘guide 
us?” 


[18] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


First of all we need to be guided into truth, the 
very truth of the best itself. The best is not always 
the obvious. Sir Joshua Reynolds, when he looked 
upon the madonnas of Raphael for the first time, won- 
dered that any one should call them great. The best 
was not apparent forthwith. How eagerly we watch 
the reviews for a guiding phrase to conduct us to an 
Opinion on some new book. Goethe slept for months 
with “The Vicar of Wakefield” under his pillow, seek- 
ing the companionship of the guide to the best. By 
the same token are we rallied to an undestanding of the 
‘beauty of holiness. God’s revelation has always been 
a life of moral resolution. The best is always appre- 
hended in the best person “with whom we have to do.” 
We are guided to the best by being enabled to forward 
our own best projects of conscience. To quote Rash- 
dall again, “the influence of the great personality con- 
sists simply in making people more disposed to do what 
their own consciences clearly recognize that they ought 
to do.” After Garrison a Whittier and an Emerson 
spring to places of moral excellence. After St. Francis 
an order comes into being. After Jesus the plainest 
man and woman on God’s earth finds nobleness pos- 
sible, a nobleness that before Jesus was known only in 
a Socrates. The great man, the guiding personality, 
“pulls triggers in other men’s consciences.” 


“We pitied him as one too much at ease 
With Nemesis and impending indigence ; 
Also, as if by way of recompense, 
We sought him always in extremities ; 
And while ways more like ours had more to please 


[19] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Our common code than his uncommon sense, 
There lurked alive in our experience 
His homely genius for emergencies. 


He was not one for men to marvel at, 

And yet there was another neighborhood 

When he was gone, and many a thrifty tear, 

There was an increase in a man like that: 

And though he be forgotten, it was good 

For more than one of us that he was here.” 
—Edward Arlington Robinson. 


It is at this point that Jesus makes his supreme 
claim upon us. In Him the historical and the spiritual 
meet. They are one. Distinction vanishes. Ever 
since, the sublimest spiritual activity must be to walk 
in the moral footsteps of the historic Christ. Christian- 
ity is distinguished by two things chiefly: a full revela- 
tion of God in an historical character and the continu- 
ing activity of the Holy Spirit. They are parts of the 
same whole. Says Browning’s St. John, 

“To me, that story,—ay, that Life and Death 


Of which I wrote ‘it was’—to me, it is, 
Is here and now: I apprehend nought else.” 


Our only hope of achieving the best is to apprehend 
that living Christ and follow his guiding steps. Chan- 
ning Pollock’s “Fool” has significance for us because 
Mr. Gilchrist plots a serious attempt at the Christ-like 
life. He believes it no more difficult to live that life 
to-day than it was when it was first lived among men. 
It brought him happiness, satisfaction, the experience 
of the best. The test is open tous now. To attain the 
best we must think the best, do the best, follow the Best 
who has ever walked among men. 


[20] 


I] 
JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


St. Luke 4:23 “And all bare him witness and wondered 
at the words of grace which proceeded out of his 
mouth,” 

St. Luke 4:28 “And they were all filled with wrath in 
the synagogue as they heard these things.” 


"| hasia first sermon in his home town produced a 

dual effect. It won both praise and blame. Men 
flattered the preacher until he meant to be more than 
eloquent; then they cast him out. His words were full 
of grace but his spirit was too strenuous. 

The setting was perfect for a dramatic presentation 
of the thought and intent of Jesus. The appointed 
scripture for the day was that great Paeeed of social 
idealism from Isaiah: 


“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the 
poor: 
He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, 
And recovering of sight to the blind, 
To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” 


It ministered to every instinct of pride in the heart of 
the patriot. Who would not thrill to such a presenta- 
tion of national destiny! The very name “Isaiah” 


[21] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


was one to evoke passion and determination. Had not 
“the strength of Isaiah,” in the opinion of a foremost 
Old Testament scholar, Sir George Adam Smith, “un- 
aided by other human factors, carried Judah through 
the first great crisis of her history” thereby continuing 
her career for more than a century? The audience of 
Jesus was seething with patriotism. They were Gali-. 
leans and Galileans had a name for patriotic fervor. 
Their emotional boiling point was very low. Small 
wonder that Jesus, a preacher of exceptional grace, 
should find a cordial response to his message. Times 
of national decay are exceptionally fitting occasions to 
recall the heroisms of the past. Lincoln is never so 
dear to us as when we tend to be least like Lincoln. 
Degenerate sons have most to say of their pious ances- 
tors. This Galilean audience was easily stirred. 

But why the sharp reaction? By what curious turn 
of events is the same audience led to praise and curse 
in almost the same breath? What ungracious word 
annulled the original verdict? 

Little is known of Jesus’ sermon. Enough is known 
fortunately to make out the cause of the bitter conduct 
of His countrymen. 


I 


As He sat down to begin His sermon He said, ‘“‘To- 
day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears.” The 
meaning is clear enough. He is saying, “I mean to do 
something about it. I mean to proceed upon it. I mean 
to make this ideal the program of My life.” Ordi- 


[22] 


JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


narily, what can be more inspiring than the noble 
resolution of some young and talented leader, who has 
ideals and knows how to expound them. Nothing 
is calculated to win applause more than to hear a young 
preacher of charm and grace lay hold on a brilliant pas- 
sage of idealism and magnify it. Common crowds 
rally to such a one. The Florentines flattered Savona- 
rola out of all conscience at the outset of his career. 
They flattered, until they saw that his determination 
was more than platform dramatics. Then they burnt 
him. And so it was in Jesus’ day. This brief passage 
of social idealism, set like a sparkling gem in the rough 
history of His nation, Jesus was assessing at its real 
value; He was determined to act upon it. Not con- 
tent with glorification of the past, Jesus seeks to make 
the present great. The prophets’ program is now to 
become the nation’s habit of social life. He means to 
make it so. Ideals that have so long adorned men’s 
minds He now thrusts as tools into their hands. The 
result was disastrous. His cool determination, pro- 
jected into their super-heated patriotism, brought a 
quick precipitate of malice and meanness. 

How much easier it would have been for Christ to 
utter the usual impassioned and fervent phrases; to 
send the congregation away full of pride and self- 
praise; to get Himself roundly applauded as a fore- 
most patriot. Elbridge Gerry, at the American Con- 
stitutional Convention, uttered a revealing if dishearten- 
ing sentiment: “The people do not want virtue but are 
the dupes of pretended patriots.” He refused to sign 
the Constitution, “the grandest work of the hand of 


[23] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


3) 


man.’ How often the leader takes a low view of 
human nature in order to gain his own ends, ends that 
are narrow, selfish, parochial. How often the emo- 
tional currents that sway the popular crowd find a 
voice in the leader. Let the leader ratify the prevail- 
ing prejudices of the time if he wants our following. 
This is the test we put to the idealist. | 

The test is subtle. Few pass it. Patience which ~ 
extends beyond one’s own life time is hard to come by. 
To remain a chronic idealist is possible on one ground 
only, the ground of faith; faith that “the universe is 
on the side of the loving will.” Jesus had it: “I, if 
I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.” The 
juniper tree in the backyard of every idealist was not 
for him. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, the most discouraging 
item on the horizon of our social assumptions is the 
naive feeling that general progress toward a Christian 
goal for society is being made. We assume that civili- 
zation is tending Christward. We take for granted that 
men and women are yearning for the Christian pro- 
gram of social ethics; that the popular slogans of every 
day are the inspired utterances of the Divine. We 
hold a shamelessly uncritical, if not uninformed, view 
of the serious business ahead before we can negotiate 
even a partial Christianization of our corporate life. 
The voice of the people is far from being the voice of 
God. 

Civilization never has accepted the ethics of Jesus. 
It is a question whether the church ever has seriously 
thought about the ethics of Jesus, particularly after the 


[24] 


JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


second century. The morality taught by Jesus was a 
vital force both in the individual and the social life of 
the early church. Up to the establishment of the mona- 
steries the Christian community undertook to practice 
the principles of living taken from the teaching of the 
Master. With the establishment of the monasteries the 
Puritan party, the party which undertook seriously to 
be Christian in its conduct, withdrew from the active 
life of the Christian community. That left the Chris- 
tian churches with average members only, who were 
dominated by the current moral ideas of the time. 
These ethical ideas were Greek in origin. The Pauline 
ethics gradually vanished from the Christian world. 
**The Christian world accepted Christian ideas of moral- 
ity but without the enthusiasm which made them a 
transforming force,’ says Hatch, in his authoritative 
work, “The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon 
the Christian Church.’ Moreover, in the last half of 
the second century and the first half of the third an 
enormous change came over the Christian community 
from another direction. The interests of contempo- 
rary writers became so absorbed with the struggles for 
soundness of doctrine as to leave but little room for 
a record of the struggle for purity of life. The atten- 
tion of a majority of Christian men was turned to the 
intellectual as distinguished from the moral element in 
Christian life.” By the time of Ambrose of Milan, 
the foremost Christian leader of his time, the victory 
of Greek ethics was complete. While Christianity was 
being transformed into a system of doctrine, the 
Stoical jurists at the imperial court were slowly elabo- 


[25] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


rating a system of personal rights. The Sermon on 
the Mount, in other words, gave way to the stoic ethics 
of Roman Law. “The basis of Christian society,” 
from that time to this, “is not Christian but Roman 
and stoical . . . the transformation is so complete that 
the modern question is not so much whether the ethics 
of the Sermon on the Mount are practical, as whether, | 
if practicable, they would be desirable.” 

We stand at that point to-day. There is as much 
opposition to the Christian principles of morality 
within the church as without the church. The resist- 
ance erected against the sweeping principles of the 
abolition of war, the Christianization of industry, the 
purification of politics, integration of mankind, is quite 
as great in the church as out of it. Civilization is not 
only not Christian but does not pretend to be Christian 
in its moral practices. Historical Christianity has not 
derived its ethical teachings from the Sermon on the 
Mount. 

No one who takes current religious controversy 
seriously can remain deceived as to its nature. We 
are again magnifying doctrine above morals; creed 
above conscience. Belief is again being exalted above 
conduct as a test of discipleship. The Sermon on the 
Mount is again being ignored while we battle over the 
creeds of the middle ages. Where is now the spirit of 
Luther who set out to turn, like some Hercules, the 
purifying stream of Christ-like morality into the 
Augean stables of contemporary social life? What of 
the spirit of Wesley whose main concern was with the 
impoverished spiritual and the decadent moral life of 


[26] 


JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


his time? Or the spirit of Dwight Moody who made 
his main assault on the strongholds of sin while he 
left to lesser men the doctrinal wrangling? What 
modern life needs is some Christ-like soul who can 
keep his zeal trained on the social impurities, who can 
bring healing for the leprous condition of our life; 
someone who can quicken our determination to make 
the social idealism of our Master the ethical practice of 
modern life. 


IT 


The second statement that the Master made was a 
warning. He warned His hearers that if they did not 
act on the social ideals of the prophet their nation 
would certainly miss its chance and that another might 
well enter into the blessings designed for them. This 
was contrary to the social imagination of His hearers. 
It was distinctly not a social flattery. It was highly 
“unpatriotic.” But Jesus supported His utterance with 
scripture, which made it so much the worse: “Of a 
truth I say unto you, there were many widows in Israel 
in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up 
three years and six months, when there came a great 
famine over all the land; and unto none of them was 
Elijah sent, but only to Zarephath, in the land of 
Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And there 
were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the 
prophet; and none of them was cleansed but only 
Naaman the Syrian.” What the widows of Israel lost 
a foreigner won; what the Syrian leper received the 


[27] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


national lepers might have had. The nation ignored the 
prophet and lost the prophet’s blessing. Foreigners 
turned to the same prophet and won the rewards of his 
helpfulness. What heresy could have been greater be- 
fore an audience of bitter patriots? It was a thrust 
at the very vitals of their blind pride. It was like tell- 
ing a robust man who takes pride in his strength of a 
fatal defect of the heart. 

We are dealing here with a timely issue. Jesus has 
uttered a Kipling’s “Recessional’’ at a national jubilee. 
The antiphonal “lest we forget” fails to blend with 
the proud boast of empire. But its effect is clean lost 
unless we train the searchlight of history upon his 
meaning. What might have been the result if His 
nation had listened and obeyed Jesus? What con- 
ceivable future might the accepted leadership of Jesus 
have carved out for His nation? A brilliant essayist 
has reminded us that if the nation had “given Him the 
response for which He asked, and of which He knew 
them capable, we should not only have seen the forces 
of early Christianity multiplied more than a thousand- 
fold, but the tremendous force of Jewish patriotism, in- 
stead of driving the race on to the fatal fight with 
Rome, would have found its true activity in a more 
glorious warfare in conquest of the world. It is rea- 
sonable to suppose that this could have happened, and 
that, had it happened, the history of the world would 
have shown at that time a change for which no term 
would have been adequate but the coming of the King- 
dom of God. As it was, Christianity overran the 
Empire in three centuries following: multiplied as it 


[28] 


JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


might have been, it would have given the Empire a 
soul to live by before it was too late, and would cer- 
tainly have anticipated the barbarian invasions by an 
invasion of the Gospel that would have obviated the 
Dark Ages.” It might have been! 

The only fitting question to properly agitate our 
modern mind is, how far will our patriotism take us 
without Christ? It did not take the Jews very far. 
Another generation after this sorry scene in His home 
town and the nation was gone. It went down in a 
rough and bloody sea of pagan conflict. It could 
not afford the profession of high social ideals on which 
it not only had refused to act but resented leadership 
that would act on them. Here is food for thought. 
The nation could not continue for more than a genera- 
tion after it rejected Christ. Is the debacle of West- 
ern civilization a repetition of the age-old fallacy that 
to be Christian you need only believe in and glorify 
with the tongue the aims of Jesus. Must one be re- 
signed to the passing of our day of grace and wait for 
its rising in some newer, or perhaps older, civilization? 
God forbid that we should try to cast from our tarpeian 
rock the lone prophet who offers us a program of 
action. 

We are face to face here with the severest tempta- 
tion put to the idealist. Is he prepared to thrust his 
universal viewpoint upon a generation whose more 
transient viewpoints are so compelling? “To every 
historic moment, transient as it is,” says Simkhovich, 
“its momentary passions are by far more absorbing 
and exciting than a general insight if ever so true to 


[29] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


life. These passions of the moment have naturally. 
enough their spokesmen. More universal viewpoints 
may also have their spokesmen but in a conflict between 
the moment and eternity which is it that is going imme- 
diately to conquer? Unquestionably the moment; for 
it is the moment that is passionate, blind and ageres- 
sive.” This the idealist understands. To insist on a 
comprehensive program of social action in harmony 
with professed ideals requires a fortitude of heart and 
an integrity of mind of a very high order. Certainly 
the present is a time full of misgiving. In every land 
in the Western world idealism finds itself greatly em- 
barrassed. Our hopes ran high during the war. We 
lived beyond our greatest capacities; we were moved 
by ideals great with promise and pregnant with mean- 
ing. A new world, and a better one, was truly to be 
ours for our blood and tears. And lo, we live to-day 
on the husks. The idealist has perhaps only one re- 
sponse: “Christ’s insight was one which future genera- 
tions may rediscover but can never upset.” We too 
will have to act on our ideals, ideals now found in the 
rubbish of post-war hates, suffocated in the monoxide 
of low-level life, or be content to see our great chance 
slowly slide to another center of civilization. 


III 


Consider in this connection the visit of the Greeks 
during the fatal last week. That visit gives Jesus a 
chance to run away, with honor. It lays before Him 


[30] 


JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


the enticing opportunity to transplant His effort into 
another environment, an environment supposedly more 
friendly and receptive; in short, to run away from his 
task in the hour of danger. Will He confess Himself 
beaten on one field and seek compensation on another? 
Will He betray the simple folks who rallied to the 
hopes He raised in them only to raise new hopes in 
other simple folks in a strange land? 

One can’t probe the mind of Jesus and say with con- 
fidence what He thought and how He met this tempta- 
tion. How many a movement fails because the leader 
can’t resist the visit of the Greeks! Certainly he must 
have asked Himself, “‘Can the idealist ever be beaten?” 
“In all the encounters that have yet chanced,” wrote 
Emerson, “I have not been weaponed for that particu- 
lar occasion, and have been historically beaten, and yet 
I know all the time that I have never been beaten; 
have never yet fought, shall certainly fight when my 
hour comes, and shall beat.” Ramsay MacDonald, the 
practical idealist of 1914, goes out of public favor into 
the night of social rejection and disgrace, a beaten man, 
only to be borne on the shoulders of a wiser and much 
chastened national determination into the prime min- 
ister’s seat in 1924. Few idealists are vindicated so 
soon; not many distinct defeats are turned into victory 
in so short a time. But the principle at work is the 
same. Can an idealist ever really be beaten? 

Jesus met this test by reavowing his faith in the ulti- 
mate and complete triumph of moral forces. “I, if I be 
lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.” Defeat is only 
a seeming reality. Triumph is certain. Moral ideals 


[31] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


rule in the end though for a moment the senses are 
autocratic. The main thing is to hold to that faith. 


IV 


Manifestly what Jesus was pleading for in this first 
sermon in His home town was an adequate sense of 
urgency. He was attempting to rally His hearers to a 
comprehensive social effort. He was trying to beguile 
them into action by holding before them a lucid and 
significant passage of social idealism. The point of 
His sermon dare not be lost on us to-day. ‘The start- 
ling fact of contemporary religious life is not its loss 
of faith but its loss of zeal. John Wesley wrote of a 
certain man in Georgia who turned apostate, “by in- 
dulging himself in harmless company he first made 
shipwreck of his zeal and then of his faith.’ We 
may make shipwreck of our faith because we are per- 
mitting our zeal to languish. 

Many are the epochs of failure in the history of the 
Christian movement. H. G. Wells recounts one of 
the most brilliant failures in “The Outline of History.” 
“Tn 1264. Kublai Khan sent a mission to the Pope with 
the evident intention of finding some common mode 
of action with Western Christendom. He asked that 
a hundred men of learning and ability should be sent 
to his court to establish an understanding. His mission 
found the Western world popeless, and engaged in one 
of those disputes about the succession that are so fre- 
quent in the history of the papacy. For two years there 


[32] 


JESUS’ FIRST SERMON 


was no pope atall. When at last a pope was appointed, 
he despatched two Dominican friars to convert the 
greatest power in Asia to hisrule! Those worthy men 
were appalled by the length and hardship of the journey 
before them, and found an early excuse for abandoning 
the expedition.” Christendom is expending millions 
in money and hundreds in men and women to win the 
very kingdom that lay within its grasp and that it 
might have had but for a lack of a sense of urgency. 
What will the future historian write of our present 
era? It is ours to say whether this shall be another 
epoch of brilliant failure or an era of spectacular suc- 
cess. The Sermon on the Mount is no more than an- 
other series of beautiful sayings such as the Analects 
of Confucius unless we make out of it a program for 
social action. 

Whether John Wesley’s test of a sermon’s effective- 
ness may be applied to Jesus’ first sermon is debatable. 
How often Wesley writes in his journal, “It pleased 
God most to bless the first sermon most because it gave 
most offense.’ Certainly the first sermon of Jesus: 
gave abundant offense. He was not again asked to 
preach in that pulpit. Again, as Wesley so often re- 
cords, “I believe I am not to preach there again.” But 
what a challenge Jesus threw out. It is interesting 
to speculate that from that audience came one who 
greatly enriched our literature and became the first of 
the notable martyrs, his own brother James, a man 
destined to play a decisive part in the Christian cause. 
And so to-day if but a few of us can respond to Jesus’ 
appeal the movement is destined to progress. On even 


[33] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


one soul a new turning sgt al of Christian history may 
depend. 


“Once to every man and nation comes the moment to 
decide: 

In the strife of truth with Falsehood for the good or 
evil side: 

Some great cause God’s new Messiah, offering each 
the bloom or blight, 

Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon 
the right, 

And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and 
the light. 

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou 
shalt stand, 

Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust 
against our land?” 


The vision we need now is not so much the light of 
a new social idealism, Jesus furnishes that, as the 
proper way we can relate ourselves to the ensuing effort 
to make that idealism effective. The issue becomes an 
acute personal problem. The hour of destiny has again 
struck. Brave hearts and willing souls are again gird- 
ing themselves for the fray. God forbid that the issue 
find us still unstirred! 


“For he to-day that sheds his blood with me 
Shall be my brethren; be he ne’er so vile 
This day shall gentle his condition. 
And gentlemen in England now a-bed 
Shall think themselves accursed they were not there.” 


[34] 


III 
THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 
Acts 1:8 “Ye shall be my witnesses.” 


HEN Bernard Shaw said, “Christ’s is the only 
name that came out of the war with credit,” he 
paid a pretty compliment to Jesus. But he also uttered 
a severe indictment of modern Christians. If the fail- 
ure of modern Christendom cannot be laid at the door 
of Jesus, as it cannot, it must be the fault of his fol- 
lowers. If the Gospel is vindicated then its advocates 
are guilty. None of us would pretend that our mod- 
ern world is the kind of a world Jesus wanted us to 
have. This is not to give way to pessimism. It is not 
to yield to despair. It is to acknowledge fact. Even 
a superficial estimate of modern life reveals enough 
points of friction, plague spots in our social life, to indi- 
cate the stiff work that remains to be done before the 
- world of Jesus’ vision can become a reality. This ac- 
quisitive society is sick, some think unto death. Our 
“power civilization” is drunken, some say unto for- 
getfulness and delirium. Materialism is riding in state, 
some suggest unto godlessness. Humanity lifts up 
pleading arms to a longed for savior. Mankind yearns 
with a sincerity that is pathetic for healing and redemp- 
tion. ‘How long, O Lord, how long!’ 


[35] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


I 


The only scheme or plan Jesus left, whereby a Christ- 
ian social order may be achieved, is contained in the 
simple words, “Ye shall be my witnesses.’’ The radical 
trust He put in common folks is paralleled only by 
His untainted trust in God. His reliance upon per- 
sonal loyalty was so great that it deserves our deepest 
consideration. Ata critical hour during the American 
Revolution, an hour when men’s hearts were turning to 
water while they clamored for more cleverness, better 
schemes, smarter plans from their leaders, Washington 
very quietly turned to a regiment of recruits and said, 
“T am counting on you men from Connecticut.” It is 
the way of Jesus, dependence on personal competence 
and loyalty. “The program of Christianity,” says 
Professor Bosworth of Oberlin, ‘is the conquest of the 
world by a campaign of testimony through empowered 
witnesses.’ It is Christ’s program to-day. 

Long since Huxley showed us that “‘the ethical prog- 
ress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic 
process, still less on running away from it, but on com- 
bating it. The history of civilization details the steps 
by which man has been successful in building up an 
artificial world within the cosmos.” A world of per- 
sonal values must get itself established by personal 
effort. In other words, Christianity is set to build 
up a world of personality, a spiritual world, within the 
realm of things. To this end natural laws and material 
things are inadequate. A world of personality is set 


[36] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


up not on impersonal principles but on personal rela- 
tions. Wherefore we can’t depend on science to save 
us though the scientist can help. It is the will and 
character of personality giving direction to the use of 
the facts and forces of life that is our hope for a re- 
newed Christendom. Bertrand Russell has it when he 
writes, “only kindliness can save the world.” Kindli- 
ness is a personal force. 

Indeed the very development in science, in skill in 
the control of natural forces, the increase of knowledge 
and ingenuity, have conspired to make a healthier, hap- 
pier, more nearly Christian world more difficult to at- 
tain. Singular as it may seem our progress for the last 
several generations has probably been registering defi- 
nitely against the development of a Christian world 
order. Consider the new knowledge in the realm of 
physical science. Men claim to know how to use cer- 
tain deadly gases, lethal rays, electrically controlled and 
unmanned airplanes in such a manner as to wipe out a 
city like London in several hours, killing every living 
thing init. By the token of the last war these forces 
will be used in the next war. A beginning full of ill 
omen was made then. Such knowledge, “progress” 
some call it, is making it more difficult to achieve a 
Christian world order. Manifestly, as a_ brilliant 
scholar suggests, “the only way out is that we should 
eventually renounce the power to injure each other 
which we now possess. But this is necessarily a spir- 
itual fact.” Beecher said, ‘‘the reforms are all right 
but I can’t stand the reformers,” while Emerson agreed 


[37] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


that the inventions are good but the inventors a 
nuisance. 

“Ye shall be my witnesses!” It is a call to spiritu- 
ality! It is an appeal for the operation of personality 
in loyalty to Him! It is a call to relate ourselves to 
Him in such a way as to become foci for the radiation 
of Jesus’ kindliness. It is an imperial command to 
take up the Master’s ideal of human helpfulness. The 
modern world will be saved from destruction, chiefly 
self-inflicted, only by the contagion of the good life. 
We acquire kindliness only as we are mastered by 
Christ who is kindly, only as we make our lives one 
long, clear testimony to His reality. 

It is of course unnecessary to point out that when 
Christ said, “Ye shall be my witnesses,” He was not 
asking us to be mere spectators of an interesting move- 
ment, making liberal comment on the awkwardness 
of the principals ; exercising critical judgment over their 
mental and moral singularity. Nor was He, on the 
other hand, asking us to become social nuisances, giving 
way to petty criticism of our social order while we 
hold ourselves strictly aloof from its dirt and duty. 
Christianity was not intended primarily as a party in 
opposition. The adequate witness of Christ is simply 
the man or woman deeply immersed in the social prob- 
lems of the time, with hand, heart and mind dedicated, 


“That the rages 
Of the ages | 
Shall be cancelled and deliverance effected from the darts 
that were, 
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things 
| fair 


[38] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


Too much modern moral ‘enthusiasm evaporates in in- 
dignant lashing of our blundering leaders. Too much 
ethical idealism is wasted in these clever diatribes on 
the debacle of civilization. We are forever taking the 
temperature of the patient and feeling his pulse that we 
may more accurately announce the date of his demise. 
But what is needed is a competent physician. What 
is needed is healing. Civilization is afflicted with an 
epidemic of evil that is very virulent and very deadly. 
Only heroic rieasures can possibly save it. 

The cost may prove great. Constructive, sustained 
effort of any kind makes severe exactions. ‘Speak the 
truth and life becomes dramatic forthwith.” Live the 
right, practice love, insist on purity, demand justice 
and it may cost you your life in sacrifice, self-renuncia- 
tion, social rejection or even worse. The adequate wit- 
ness is what the word literally translated means, a 
“martyr.” 

This whole matter is not very attractive to the mod- 
ern mind. It raises curious ghosts of the past. The 
men and women who have always been held up to us as 
adequate witnesses are exactly the kind of men and 
women we shy from as companions. They are the 
puritan type. And of course it is a sign of modernity 
to say something smart about the Puritans. We think 
of John Bunyan in a famous passage of self-revelation: 
“When I was but a child of nine or ten years old, these 
things did so distress my soul, that in the midst of my 
merry sports and childish vanities amidst my vain com- 
panions, I was often much cast down and afflicted in 
my mind therewith. Yet I could not let go my sins.” 


[39] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


The sins were a love of hockey and dancing on the 
village green! What a picture to hold before a modern 
audience of adolescents, for instance! Frankly, it is 
not very encouraging. We are still living in the 
“‘village-sceptic’ age, an age characterized by Bliss 
Perry’s story of the shoemaker who trained his dog 
to bark angrily when the Methodist church bell rang. 
But the truth of Puritanism is that it was a daring 
adventure in sincerity of life, purity of thought and 
word, integrity of social conduct and the expansion of 
the intellect. It was a creative attempt in its day to 
bear an adequate witness to Christ and thereby to re- 
deem a decadent social order from final collapse. What 
is important is that we deliver a similarly effective 
influence in our day though the outward manifesta- 
tions be different. How good a Puritan Jesus would 
have made is debatable. Certain it is though that the 
Puritans made exceptionally good Christians. 

How then can we be adequate witnesses to Christ? 
Along what specific lines will our testimony run? What 
are the timely issues that need courageous lives for their 
vindication ? 


IT 


We bear our testimony first of all when we exhibit 
in our characters and careers a love that operates. 
Paul’s faith that “all things work together for good 
to them that love’ is perhaps the only adequate faith 
for the modern world. “The universe is on the side 
of the loving will” but we have been placing more trust 


[40] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


in the cunning intellect. We have abstained from the 
practice of good will, especially corporate good will, 
almost as if it were a cause for public scandal. The 
French, we are told, refuse to eat the luscious black- 
berries which grow so abundantly in their land because, 
they say, “they give us the fever.” Some ancient taboo 
inhibits an attempt to investigate the grounds for their 
refusal. That the Americans eat blackberries with 
comfort does not change the habit of the French. 
Does a similar taboo inhibit the practice of corporate 
good will among us?. 

True, personal benevolence has increased rapidly 
among us; men and women, especially very rich men 
and women, compete for honors in extravagant gifts 
to charitable and educational institutions. How fre- 
quently the personal benevolence is joined in the same 
man’s life to corporate brutality! We “sin by syndi- 
cate’ while we love in a petty private way. It is lov- 
ing, and so saving, by syndicate that we must have if 
a world of good will is to be more than a pious wish, 
If we are to be His witnesses we will have to bear Him 
testimony, not as a private diversion but in our public 
careers. Such progress as we have made toward a 
world of good will has been made because He has 
not been left without witnesses. 

The redemption of modern life must be a redemption 
of our institutions as much as of our souls. A world 
which is at the same time a personal paradise and an 
institutional hell is unthinkable. Education, industry, 
politics and religion need to be captured for Christian- 
ity if we are to have a Christian world order. Our 


[41] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


institutions must be impregnated with the good will of 
Christ. It is at this point that our testimony must be 
registered. Consider what that may mean. Can you 
imagine a board of bank directors pausing in their 
deliberation and asking themselves, ‘Is this thing that 
we are about to decide going to promote the Kingdom 
of God?” Or what of a band of politicians? or a con- 
ference of international statesmen? or the regular meet- 
ing of the directors of a great industry? Unheard of! 
But it must be heard of. It must be done lest we be 
arrant hypocrites when we insist on a message of good 
will, a gospel of love, from the pulpit Sunday after 
Sunday. The hour has struck for a dramatization in 
our corporate life of the loving will of Christ. It may 
require heroism of a very high order, moral heroism, 
to give it reality but nothing less is demanded of us 
by Him who confidently counts on us to be His wit- 
nesses. Alongside it the physical heroism of the patriot 
and the martyr may well seem like a small thing. _ 
The thing has been done. Great souls there have 
been who have reckoned honestly with the implication 
of their discipleship. Only recently one such died. He 
was a powerful man of business who upon coming into 
his place of power announced quite simply that he meant 
to conduct his business in strict harmony with the 
ethics of Jesus. He carried through his intention. 
When he died the Atlanta ‘Constitution,’ one of our 
leading papers, said he was a man of “very unique busi- 
ness methods.” ‘That which is to-day unique will to- 
morrow be the customary practice as we become His 
witnesses. Upon the occasional personality who has 


[42] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


imagination and moral courage enough to dramatize 
good will the future will turn as upon an axis. It is 
good will made concrete that preaches most effectively. 
It is love incarnate that is redemptive. 


IIT 


The adequate witness will find it necessary, I am cer- 
tain, to join to high intellect, high purpose. The sug- 
gestion is trite enough; the fact is not so common. 
The sharpened intellect has not infrequently become a 
death-dealing weapon rather than a health-bringing 
force. Education has been again and again, a lamb- 
skin thrown over a spirit of barbarism within. That 
is a dangerous alliance indeed, the alliance of man’s 
half-savage impulses with his growing scientific knowl- 
edge. ‘‘Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our age,” 
Professor J. B. S. Haldane of Cambridge assures us, 
“is the misapplication of science. It is notorious that 
the principal result of many increases in human power 
and knowledge has been either an improvement in meth- 
ods of destroying human life and property or an ac- 
centuation of economic inequality.” I am not in the 
midst of a tirade on modern science! What stands out 
is that new crimes against humanity are again being 
committed because men have divorced intellect from 
conscience, power from high purpose. How pathetic 
are those words of Emerson in his famous Cooper 
Union Speech, “If his (Webster’s) moral sensibility 
had been proportioned to the force of his understanding 


[43] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


what limits could have been set to his genius and benefi- 
cent power.” What was true of one spectacular person 
several generations ago we are told is threatening to 
become the general character of modern men and 
women. 

It is easy, and therefore dangerous, to generalize 
on a few spectacular examples. Nevertheless, we 
have been struck by the prevalence of crime, in many 
instances ghastly crime, committed by persons of rare 
mental accomplishment. Clutton Brock suggested sev- 
eral years ago that we have all espoused low views of 
life. Those who become enmeshed in great wrong- 
doing are the ones who have been overcome by the 
poison. We are all living in that same poisoned en- 
vironment. We who are whole have been immunized 
by high purpose. It is a general diffusion of high pur- 
pose that we want above all things; men and women 
who are dedicated to social helpfulness; who will by 
the very skill acquired use their lives as standing points 
from which to exercise a constructive moral influence! 

We have been painting the face of civilization with 
our deceptive mental cosmetics to make it look better 
than it is. We have simulated the appearance of a 
health we do not have. Our deception stands revealed, 
our face is washed white and pale in the storm of an 
unredeemed world. Our lives have pointed men no- 
where. Certainly not to One who died that men might 
be free to live a happy, healthy moral life, unafraid of 
God and safe from the pollution of wrong. We have 
not been witnesses to Him. We have not seriously con- 
sidered that as part of our task in life. When we come 


[44] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


to consider it we will find it necessary to adopt the 
stern and unbending way of high purpose to give 
our lives meaning and to bring our world help. 


IV 


The adequate witness will demonstrate the satisfac- 
tion that comes from persistent loyalty to the One who 
is both supreme in the moral realm and stands to-day 
as the one hope of the race. The fundamental craving 
of every one is for satisfaction, all our striving and 
vexation of spirit, all our effort, is an attempt to 
achieve a satisfactory life. The saint and the sensual- 
ist, the banker and the gambler, the scholar and the 
sport are all after the same thing, satisfaction. The 
adequate witness demonstrates the source of supreme 
satisfaction as loyalty to Christ, the ethical Christ of 
the Gospels. 

Jesus’ avowed aim was to bring satisfaction to every 
one that would come to Him. “I am come that they 
might have life and have it more abundantly.” There 
is deep pathos in the question spoken when the many 
were turning from Him, “Will ye also go away?” 
Has the Christian life broken down at just the point 
where its validity must be vindicated, the power to give 
satisfaction? The disciples answered ‘To whom else 
shall we turn?’ A passion torn world is asking just 
that question. We, if we are adequate witnesses, must 
by our lives of persistent loyalty have the answer ready. 

The modern man and woman is out for a satisfactory 


[45] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


life. That is the meaning of all these disturbing 
capers of the younger generation. And what of the 
curious antics of the older generation? ‘We want 
reality,’ we say. We search for it by following our 
instincts. We live natural lives, or pretend to, because 
we get a thrill out of it. For, of course, an instinct 
has the power to give us a thrill. War thrills; it min- 
isters to the instinct of pugnacity. Gain thrills; it 
ministers to the acquisitive instinct. Lust thrills; it 
ministers to the sex instinct. So we set up our mod- 
ern pantheon of false gods, the instincts, and go 
through our ritual of worship. The painted face, the 
gaudy dress, the weird dance, what are they but items 
in the ceremony and ritual of our modern paganism ? 
All the time we are deluding ourselves with the notion 
that “having fun is the same thing as being happy.” 
We are sinking, as Augustine, who tried the same cere- 
mony, said, “by the weight of our own pride.” 

But the great emotions follow the persistent loyal- 
ties. The thrill that lasts, for the instincts give us only 
a temporary thrill which is always followed by deep 
depression, comes from a source deeper than instinct, 
the will to loyalty. Permanent ecstasy is joined to the 
consecrated life. The most signal service we can 
render our very impressionable age is the example of 
a persistently loyal life. Just as Samuel Johnson an- 
swered the clever jests of Voltaire by going weekly 
to St. Clement Danes to worship so we must answer 
our modern frivolity by quietly holding to the ethical 
Christ. Itis the service our age needs, a demonstration 
of the satisfaction that loyalty can bring. When 


[46] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


Samuel Butler said that the best way to break down 
morality and bring in an age in which free love and 
intemperance are easy is to “be a moderate churchman’”’ 
he gave away the secret how to bring in an age in which 
redemptive love and self-control are easy, namely, by 
being enthusiastic Christians. 


V 


The adequate witness maintains a steadfast and 
unwavering faith in the salvability of mankind. He 
will not yield to the temptation to say ‘‘What’s the 
use?” Christ has significance to him, not alone be- 
cause God’s forgiving and benevolent will toward man 
stands revealed in Him but also because He satisfies a 
definite spiritual yearning in man. Just as the scientist 
discovers the remarkable secrets of nature because hu- 
manity has need of them so the adequate witness be- 
lieves that Christ came because man has need of Him. 
This need is definitely in the consciousness of modern 
man. The adequate witness heightens the sense of 
that need by his firm belief in the capacity of the race 
to respond to Christ. 

Nothing can be more important in our modern world 
than just that kind of faith. Jesus’ deeds of mercy 
while on earth were always conditioned upon faith. 
Where men did not believe he could not do mighty 
works. It is so to-day. The demonstration of the 
power of the Christian movement is conditioned by 
our faith, not so much in its power as in the respon- 


[47] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


siveness of mankind to its appeal. Throughout the 
world run sinister forces with the evil tidings of pes- 
simism. ‘They spread the propaganda of despair, the 
despair of humanity. The militarists of every coun- 
try, and every country unfortunately has so many of 
them, are spreading a subtle and beguiling suspicion of 
the people of every other country. Our statesmen are 
afflicted with what has been called “an official pessi- 
mism.’”’ Men and women, it is implied, will not respond 
to good will, love, and forgiveness. The men and 
women of the churches, be it said to their discredit, 
have yielded to this malady. We rally to the ill omen 
of the gleaming sword while we shake our heads over 
the good news of the Gospel. True, we believe the Gos- 
pel but we doubt people. Not so Jesus. Hear Him 
in John’s Gospel, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto me.’’ Consider the rebuke to the pious doubters 
of his day when he challenged them with the sharp 
phrase, “Remember the sign of the prophet Jonah.” 
The sign, namely, that a frivolous and decaying civiliza- 
tion will respond if there be found one man who will 
be steadfast with his message. “A nation can be 
changed in a generation,” says the sociologist. The 
adequate witness believes it and imparts the contagion 
of his faith to others. He holds an attitude of expect- 
ancy toward God and man. With the Apostle Paul 
he sees the whole creation groaning and travailing for 
the revealing of the sons of God. He believes that just 
as the industrial revolution changed completely our 
whole life, physical, social and spiritual, so a new 
Christian revolution can change our modern world 


[48] 


THE ADEQUATE WITNESS 


and mold it “nearer to the heart’s desire.’”?’ He knows 
it can be done because he believes that men and women 
will respond to Christ when He is once again given the 
preéminence. That faith goes far toward achieving 
the desired end. 


VI 


These are the general lines along which it seems 
necessary that our testimony run. How specifically 
each one can be a witness must be determined by that 
one. A measure of social imagination together with 
a dash of enthusiasm will settle that. What needs per- 
haps to be pointed out is the startling ease with which 
we set aside the whole matter. We perhaps nourish 
the ancient delusion that God will manifest Himself in 
some spectacular way and save us; or that Jesus will 
suddenly appear on the clouds at a given time to snatch 
us out of our difficulty. We give way to the vain and 
languid hope that a supernatural substitute for human 
effort will be given us. Remember that the cloud 
received Him out of their sight. We must now be His 
witnesses. A modernized apocalypticism offers no sal- 
vation to a civilization that is running down. 

The obvious place to begin is where we find ourselves. 
It may be a place of obscurity and insignificance. We 
must be as heroic as we can be in that place, remember- 
ing Maeterlinck’s counsel that “deeds of heroism are 
only offered to those who have been for many years 
heroes in obscurity and silence.” 


[49] 


IV 
SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


St. Matthew 15:19 “Out of the heart come forth evil 
thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, 
false witness, railings: these are the things which 
defile the man.” 


ESUS leaves us in no doubt about the seat of sin in 

our lives. “Out of the heart” or, as we would say, 
the imagination, come the things which defile the man. 
The evil growth of sin draws its sustaining life from 
deep within; its roots penetrate the rich imagery of 
the man. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne in one of his ““Twice-told 
Tales” has a story of an old man, comfortably seated 
in a deep luxurious arm-chair, with a bottle of generous 
Madeira wine before him with which to warm his 
aged blood. He was set to enjoy a quiet hour by him- 
self. Three figures visited him. “These were Fancy, 
who had assumed the garb and aspect of an itinerant 
show-man, with a box of pictures on her back; and 
Memory in the likeness of a clerk, with a pen behind 
her ear, an inkhorn at her buttonhole and a huge manu- 
script volume beneath her arm; and lastly, behind the 
other two, a person shrouded in a dusky mantle which 
concealed both face and form.’ It was Conscience. 
Fancy proceeded to show her pictures to the old man. 


[50] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


They were in turn pictures of adultery, murder and 
the brutal robbing of orphaned children. In each pic- 
ture the old man could distinguish himself as the cen- 
- tral figure. He protested. Then Memory turned the 
leaves of her volume only to come upon a record which 
plainly told of the heart preparation for just that kind 
of deed. And Conscience unveiling her face smote her 
dagger to his heart. Though a record of sinful 
thought that was never embodied in an act the old man 
felt the venom of the dagger of Conscience. His heart 
seemed to fester with it. It is the novelist’s way of 
presenting Jesus’ view of sin in our lives. 


I 


The world we live in concerns itself very little about 
sin. “What does M. Renan make of sin?” wrote 
Amiel. “I think I leave it out,’ was Renan’s reply. 
We have been doing just that, leaving sin out. 

It seems as though the very office of religion were 
being used to make us comfortable in a state of indif- 
ference to the fact of sin in life. How much prayer, 
for instance, is one long struggle to make wrong things 
seem right? We seek to win the approval of the 
Almighty for our selfish schemes. How much wor- 
ship is a bit of “protective mimicry of the good” to 
cover our otherwise godless conduct? There is a Rus- 
sian story that stands written in “Painted Windows” 
which tells of a man who set out to murder an old 
woman in order to rob her. As he tramped through 


[57] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


the snow he suddenly remembered that it is a saint’s 
day. With the hatchet in his blouse and the cruelty and 
greed in his heart he dropped on his knees instantly. 
He crossed himself violently as he implored God to 
forgive him his evil intention. He rose, “refreshed 
and forgiven,’ postponing the murder till the next 
night. How much charity covers a “multitude of. 
sins” as we love to read! Weare still religious. We 
can’t help that. “I may be the greatest humbug out,” 
says one of Hugh Walpole’s characters in ““The Cap- 
tives,” “but I’m religious. Religion is like ’aving a 
’are-lip, once you've got it you'll be bothered with it 
all your life.” Being bothered with it we are making 
the dangerous experiment of subverting it to our own 
ends, using it in a guilty effort to reénforce our willful 
indifference to sin in our lives. 

For there are signs of sin in modern life. The 
whole countenance of modern civilization bears unmis- 
takable signs of sinful living. Not only has carnal 
corruption left its tracings but there is a definite sign 
of general moral impotence that is alarming. “The 
characteristic feature of our time,” writes an English 
psychologist, “is a certain pathetic moral impotence. 
There is no lack of good will and aspiration but there 
is little effective driving power. Very little, as we 
say, ‘gets done.’” We lack the will that is victorious. 
Something has gone wrong within. We love the good, 
we intend the fine, we aspire to the noble but we 
achieve next to nothing. Individually and collectively, 
we are full of emotional goodness, practically none of 
which gets itself expressed in good deeds or noble char- 


[52] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


acters. “I can be good if I will,” says Bishop Temple, 
“put I won't.” The apostle Paul read in such impo- 
tence of will a clear sign of sin. “To will is present 
with me but to do that which is good is not. For the 
good which I would I do not: but the evil which I 
would not, that I practice.” The modern world shows 
enough symptoms of that inner indifference, that pa- 
ralysis of will, combined with a fine emotional leaning 
to goodness, to convince one that it is deeply smitten 
by sin. Wherefore we need to concern ourselves more 
sedulously about our sin. 


IT 


But why should I concern myself about my sin? 
Why should I try to acquire a sense of guilt? ‘The 
higher man of to-day,” Sir Oliver Lodge tells us, “is 
not worrying about his sins, much less about their pun- 
ishment; his mission, if he is good for anything, is 
to be up and doing.” The analysis is undoubtedly cor- 
rect. The modern man is not worrying about his 
sins. But he ought to be worrying about them just 
because he is not up and doing. He is not up and 
doing, and indeed can’t be, because of his sin. Sin 
has inhibited his capacity to be “up and doing.” The 
modern man ought be worrying about his sins just 
as a languid, tired, blundering person ought be wor- 
ried about his health. For the modern man is a morally 
languid, tired, blundering person. He shows all the 
signs of moral exhaustion ; exhaustion due to a foreign 


[53] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


growth in his character which is drawing off his moral 
energy. 

We need to worry about our sins then first of all 
to become aware of our own spiritual state. This sub- 
jective sense of exceptional well-being that afflicts us 
moderns is not a sign of moral health. A certain form 
of pulmonary tuberculosis induces, through the germs 
of the disease, in the patient a subjective sense of 
energy and well-being. But the doctor is not deceived. 
He knows that the end is near when the sense of energy 
is strongest. Had one asked Cicero about the prospect 
of endurance of the Roman Empire he undoubtedly 
would have lapsed into superlatives in his reply. He 
would have pointed to its necessity to business, to its 
exceptional activity in every part of the world, to its 
rare efficiency and its far-flung legions. Yet Cicero 
lived on the eve of its collapse. Individually and col- 
lectively, the modern man has a vital reason for being 
concerned about his sins. Sheer self-preservation ought 
to prompt him to a very sharp self-scrutiny. There 
are poisons, we are told, that throw their victim into 
the greatest ecstasy, that make him unduly hilarious, 
just before they bring upon him the death agony. Sin 
has a like effect; especially the sins of luxury, brutality 
and oppression, the major sins of modern times. 

The modern man ought to worry about his sins, not 
because of the punishment he may be laying up for 
himself, but because of the harm he may be doing by 
being just himself. John Masefield in “The Everlasting 
Mercy” draws a picture of a man who is wholly given 
to sin. Saul Kane does not regard himself a sinner, 


[54] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


of course, and therefore joins himself to company 
wherever it is to be had. He is found on a given 
occasion in the company of a lad when the lad’s mother 
comes upon them. The mother protests severely that 
he, Saul Kane, should be in the presence of her boy. 
Says Kane, 


“But this old mother made me see 
The harm I done by being me.” 


In Goethe’s great drama “Faust” there is a scene of 
Faust and Mephistopheles in Margaret’s room. They 
have gone there to plot their malicious scheme. Just 
after they have left Margaret enters the room, 


“How sultry ’tis,” 


she exclaims. She opens the window, only to find that 
the air is not really sultry without. 


“There runs a shudder through my frame.” 


It is the effect of the presence of Mephistopheles. 

How often there is packed up within these characters 
of ours, with our fine scorn for the excellent and our 
guilty worship of the material rewards of life, char- 
acters which bear the label “good,” “successful,” 
“prominent citizen,’ that which is rank moral poison 
and which will surely slay any young man or woman 
who consumes it in fellowship. We go about like 
tainted selves! The modern man needs to worry about 
his sins because of the harm he may be doing by being 
just himself. With that fine precision Ibsen traces the 


[55] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


cruelty and horror of sin in the disasters inflicted upon 
the innocent, especially upon posterity! This is the 
deadliness of sin! 


IIT 


For centuries it was the fashion to define and. 
classify the sins of humanity. Frequently the defini- 
tion was so framed as to leave out the very sin that 
was most besetting. We see the mote in our brother’s 
eye, remaining, meanwhile, stupidly unconscious of the 
huge beam in our own eye. The spectrum shows only 
colors of the substances that are not present in the 
object upon which it is trained. The elements present 
leave only a dark line. We are all too repentant of 
our neighbor’s sins, thanking God that we are not as 
other people, extortioners, adulterers, unjust, “or even 
as this publican.” The assumption on which Paul op- 
erated before his conversion was that his life was the 
norm. He had not known sin until he redefined it so 
as to include his own kind of life, until he examined 
‘himself from an external viewpoint, as it were. Out 
of the heart come the forces that make us sinful. Sin 
is not then so much a specific act which can be isolated, 
described, defined and cried about, as it is a general 
state of the heart, or, as we would say, an inner atti- 
tude of the mind. For the seven deadly sins of the 
middle ages, pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony 
and sensuality, we may well put St. Paul’s “impotence 
of will for any good thing” as a general definition of 
sin. Augustine found that the peculiarity of sin was 


[56] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


that it left the will free to command the body only to 
be incapable of commanding itself. Such is the sub- 
tlety of sin, giving us freedom to do everything, but the 
right, the good, the true. 

Sin in the modern world cannot then be named in 
a few outstanding and spectacular iniquities. Its main 
effect is traceable in a general coarsening of character. 
Our taste for the fine is gone. Our literature, our 
music, our code of daily living, all bear unmistakable 
signs of a deep seated coarseness in our character. We 
have an emotional leaning to the good, the beautiful 
and the true but sin has sharpened our taste for the 
coarse, the sensual and the vain. The confessions of 
Augustine record a prayer of his young manhood. 
“Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.” 
Later he adds, “‘I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me 
soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, 
which I wished to have satisfied rather than extin- 
guished.’ The prayer is very modern! 

Loose habits have developed a taste for looseness. 
That is the worst consequence of our post-war con- 
duct. What we did in a moment of relaxed vigilance 
has developed within us a definite taste for the coarse 
and the vulgar. The young man who took his first 
glass of strong drink in his mother’s home where it 
was served as an interesting and diverting experience, 
just because it was unlawful, it had never been served 
in the home before, is to-day damned with an uncon- 
querable taste for it. His character is definitely coars- 
ened, perhaps permanently. The young woman who 
suffers early sophistication through the plays and novels 


[57] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


of the modern world gains “a cheap initiation into cer- 
tain abnormalities of artificial society’ but she also is 
given ‘a willful misunderstanding of the scale of val- 
ues” of life, as Bliss Perry has pointed out; she too 
develops a damning incompetence to appreciate and 
achieve the lovely and the fine. Her character too is 
coarsened. “When Mr. Kipling, many years ago,” to” 
quote Professor Perry again, “published his “The 
Light that Failed,’ Mr. Barrie, then a young journalist, 
made this shrewd comment upon Dick Heldar, Mr. 
Kipling’s hero: “This man is under the curse of think- 
ing that because he has knocked about the world in 
shady company he has no more to learn. It never 
dawns upon him that he is but a beginner in knowl- 
edge of life compared to many men who have stayed 
at home with their mothers.’ I do not know more 
exact phrases than Mr. Barrie’s in which to describe the 
spirit of the plays and novels from which many under- 
graduates are now getting their notions of what they 
call ‘real life.’ ” 

The prophet Ezekiel has given us a series of startling 
pictures of his vision of abominations in Jerusalem. 
Among them is one that shows Ezekiel digging his 
way through a hole in the wall to a secret chamber in 
the temple. ‘So I went in and saw: and behold, every 
form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all 
the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the 
wall round about.” His spirit guide addresses the 
prophet: “Son of man hast thou seen what the elders 
of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in his 
chambers of imagery? for they say Jehovah seeth us 


[58] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


not.” The modern psychologist readily verifies the 
prophet’s account of the inner degradation that sin 
works. “Turn over a stone in the field,’ writes John 
Burroughs, “‘and behold the consternation among the 
small folk beneath it—ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders 
—all objecting to the full light of day.” It is an ac- 
count of the mind of a modern man where sin has been 
at work. “Out of the heart come forth evil thoughts, 
murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, 
railings: these are the things which defile the man.”’ Or 
again, “keep the heart with all diligence; for out of it 
are the issues of life.” 


IV 


There is a way of being worldly without being gross. 
When Paul wrote the sad line, “Demas forsook me 
having loved this present world,” he did not suggest 
that Demas was guilty of gross, carnal sin. He had 
held daily dalliance with the trifling delights of the 
sensuous world; he had, in imagination at least, given 
himself to the tangible prizes of life. He was worldly. 
“Thus with the baggage of this present world,” says 
Augustine, “was I held down pleasantly as in sleep.” 
The main line of sin in modern life is just such dalli- 
ance with the delights of the sensuous world, just such 
worldliness. We live like decadent Roman emperors 
with their excess of splendor, softness and opulence. 
The luxury itself, though it verge on carnal degrada- 
tion, is not so damning in the immediate physical con- 
sequence as in the incidental moral consequences. 


[59] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Samuel Johnson thought that the sensuous delights, the 
rich luxuries of life are the things that make death 
terrible. We know that they are the things that make 
life futile. 

They make life futile because trifles get exalted into 
matters of consequence. William Watson has worked 
this out with telling effect in a stanza from his poem 
“The Things that are More Excellent” : 


“To dress, to call, to dine, to break 

No canon of the social code, 

The little laws that lacqueys make, 

The futile decalogue of mode, 

How many a soul for these things lives 
With pious passion, grave intent 

While nature careless-handed gives 

The things that are more excellent.” 


And so we go about with our lacquey-minds and futile 
decalogues wholly unequal to the tasks of modern life, 
incapable, because preoccupied by the trifling things of 
life, of appreciating our moral tasks or conceiving and 
seeing through any definite moral design. Jesus tried 
to lay bare this subtle strategy of sin in his parable of 
the great feast. Each one invited made excuse on the 
ground of preoccupation with, either a field, a yoke of 
oxen or a wife, i.e., with the tangible prizes of life. And 
so the kingdom of an achieved righteousness, the reali- 
zation of triumphant love, the appreciation of serenity 
and peace is daily slipping from us because we are 
“laying waste our powers” and are giving “our souls 
away.” 

Here we face a very intimate personal problem. The 


[60] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


real temptation is not usually one that would take us 
into gross carnal wrong-doing but this much more 
subtle and beguiling suggestion to regale ourselves in 
the joys of living and not vex ourselves overmuch 
about the things that are more excellent. Edwin Ar- 
lington Robinson in his poem “The Man Who Died 
Twice’ recounts the story of a talented young man 
who had a great gift for music; but he sinned against 
his gift; he permitted the worldly delights to draw him. 
Lust and drunkenness follow. In a delirium Fernando 
Nash once more hears the call of his gift. He tries to 
respond but alas he has only enough left in him to beat 
a Salvation Army drum. The man is dead. Futility 
is his death. From that death there is no resurrection; 
for that sin there is no redemption. It is the sin against 
the Holy Ghost. His physical death later is an unim- 
portant event. One wonders whether sin in our mod- 
ern world is not dealing out exactly that kind of death; 
whether we are not actually facing a colossal tempta- 
tion to sin against the Holy Ghost. For such a sin no 
modern Dante can conceivably furnish us a purgatory 
where we can work out our salvation. Even Jesus, who 
never despaired of mankind, said that the sin against 
the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven. 

Beware then the worldliness which calls not to gross 
carnal iniquity but to the neglect of our God-given pur- 
pose for the delights of the time! To Paul’s warning 
“flee youthful lusts’ must be added “conquer mature 
temptations,” for worldliness is peculiarly a temptation 
that besets maturity, that time in life when our idealisms 
naturally tend to fade out, when the accumulated re- 


[6r] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


sources of life make physical pleasures so possible, 
when the period of moral sag sets in. Beware the temp- 
tation to take that “moral holiday” of which William 
James wrote, a holiday from which few return to the 
main business of life. 


Vv 


The New Testament never speaks of sin but it speaks 
of the remedy for it at the same time. It never preaches 
guilt but it preaches salvation too. In St. Paul’s classic 
chapter on sin, the seventh of Romans, he points out the 
twofold effect of sin upon him. He was duped and he 
was enslaved; he was blind to his condition and power- 
less to change it. Through the centuries the testimony 
of honest men and women coincides with that of Paul. 
What is the way out? How can we, in this constant 
struggle of flesh with spirit, gain the prize of spiritual 
victory, peace and joy? 

His true state was brought home to Paul through an 
external standard, the law. “I had not known sin ex- 
cept through the law.” Augustine too was moved to 
redemptive contrition when he saw the simple and the 
ignorant achieve a purity that was beyond him. He 
turned upon his friend Alypius: “What ails us? The 
unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we 
with our learning and without heart, lo, where we wal- 
low in flesh and blood.” Brilliant powerlessness knows 
its guilt and impotence when it looks upon simple purity 
and victorious virtue. Let the modern man examine 


[62] 


SIN AND THE MODERN MAN 


himself in the light of Christ, our external standard. 
Let him judge what is right not by his own standard, 
sin has lowered that, but by the standard of that One 
“who can never be surpassed.”” How biting the sarcasm 
of Jesus when he turns upon his hecklers, ‘“‘Why judge 
ye not of yourselves that which is right?” The impli- 
cation of course is that in the midst of sleek compla- 
cency with self-made second-best standards there yet 
come moments of grave suspicion that we are not as 
right and good as we pretend to be. We seek an ex- 
ternal standard. The modern man, to retain any shred 
of moral honesty, must sooner or later cast his life 
alongside the standard of excellence as it is in Christ 
Jesus. What moments of bitter humiliation, deep, inner 
humiliation, will follow such a test!) What prayer of 
shame at our own brilliant impotence! “Wretched man 
that lam. Who shall deliver me out of the body of this 
death?” Who has not experienced that knows very 
little of life indeed! 

But the modern man needs more than a standard. 
The very authenticity and excellence of a lofty external 
standard is depressing to one who understands his sunk- 
en state and shrunken power. What good is it asking 
me to be like Christ in the very moment when I have 
come upon my unlikeness to Him, and more particu- 
larly, my powerlessness to be like Him. What is the 
message of the Gospel to a world of sin? The story of 
a great example? No, the revelation of a great redemp- 
tion. “I thank God through Jesus Christ,” cries the help- 
less, convicted Paul. Because “God was in Christ re- 
conciling the world to himself.” We have not done 


[63] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


with sin until we experience that reconciliation. Sin 
unforgiven has a curious power of generation. Sin 
dealt with at the foot of the Cross is sin done with. 
It passes out of life and leaves us free and fit for the 
achievement of “the good that we would.” 

Who that has seen the Christ hung on his cross, 
struggling with sin, seeming to lose yet winning the 
redemptive conviction for all mankind that God is love 
and forgiveness, that the sinner alienated may become 
the son restored, who that has seen Him dying that men 
might be convicted and empowered, can any longer dally 
with the deceptive delights of sin. Explain it as we 
may the sinner finds new life at the foot of the Cross. 
Something happens within that makes us able. As 
the years go on we may learn to say again with Paul, 
“T can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth 
me,” 


[64] 


V 
HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


Hebrews 4:15 “For we have not a high priest that can- 
not be touched with the feeling of our infirmities ; 
but one that hath been in all points tempted like as 
we are yet without sin.’ 


Aaa such as these would be a shocking blas- 
phemy were they to appear in another place. 
They stand in sacred writ. They are hallowed by the 
sanctity of the truth they convey. Jesus was “tempted 
in all points like as we are.”’ Let us not blink the fact. 
He knew at what cost in self-discipline and struggle 
one comes to self-mastery. Any doctrine of His 
divinity that robs Him of His rich humanity is a rever- 
sion to an ancient heresy and a perversion of an eternal 
truth. The writer to the Hebrews is quite certain on 
that point. 

To be tempted is not a sign of moral depravity. Two 
people are never tempted; the hardened sinner and the 
complacent Pharisee. The one is confirmed in evil, 
the other is convinced of his goodness. Both are moral 
corpses. Temptation is a sign of moral aliveness. 
Temptation is the signal to rally the moral reserves to 
the defense when the citadel of the soul is attacked. 
There is a certain moral necessity in temptation. 


[65] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


“When the fight begins within himself 
A man’s worth something . 


Where do our temptations come from? Whence these 
strange and complex crises which so try men’s souls? 
The sources of temptation are legion. Only one with 
an expert knowledge of psychology combined with the 
poetic insight of genius could adequately catalogue the 
manifold facts of life from which our temptations 
emerge. A few of them are common enough. 


I 


Our temptations spring from a curious mixture of 
evil intention, past meanness, complacency, and pride. 
They are of our own manufacture more often than we 
care to admit. Our past sins fight, through temptation, 
to retain their mastery over us. To cultivate the art of 
wrong-doing is to bring into play a series of habits 
whose hold on character grows with the passing years. 
No amount of moral resolution can set aside the claims 
these habits make on us without a stiff fight. Thus do 
we come upon one of the most common sources of 
temptation. How much “seeming unreality of the 
spiritual life,’ for instance, is traceable directly to a 
guilty neglect of the things of the spirit, as Dr. King 
has so accurately suggested. The habit of neglect has 
thwarted the will to know. There came a day when 
the Psalmist “remembered God and was troubled.” The 
service of the living God is made more difficult when 


[66] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


one has bowed the knee in the house of Rimmon. 
Small wonder that the aged King Lear, an adept in 
grossness, commands the druggist to give him an effec- 
tive potion to “sweeten the imagination.” 

Our past goodness is a singularly discouraging 
source of temptation. No greater drag is laid on moral 
resolution than a perfectly legitimate knowledge of past 
goodness. Familiarity with evil dulls the conscience 
and deadens the will. That we know. But does not 
familiarity, too great an intimacy with goodness, do 
exactly the same thing? Why should we strive? Have 
we not won our laurels? Have we not borne the burden 
and heat of the day? Is it not enough? Can it be 
that Jesus rebuked the rich young ruler when he called 
him “‘good” because the Master feared this temptation 
to satisfaction with past accomplishment? “Why callest 
thou me good? There is none good save God only.” 
Very truly has evil been described as “the backward 
pull of the lesser good.” For to overcome our own past 
goodness is as much a task of the moral life as to over- 
come our past evil. Experience teaches us it is a more 
exacting task. A certain pride of self-respect takes 
possession of us when we have reached that place of 
moral self-mastery, when we have beaten our bodies 
under. We justly claim the rewards of virtue only to 
be reminded that 

“When we looked for crowns to fall 
We find the tug’s to come—that’s all ;” 


that respectability is not enough; that the moral ideal 
lays upon us a “pitilessly expanding moral task.” We 


[67] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


can never let well enough alone. We must always 
“press on to the mark of the upward calling in Christ 
Jesus.” To become ‘‘gospel-hardened,” too familiar 
with the good, is a deadly snare laid for our unsuspect- 
ing selves, 

And what of our imperious passions? They are part 
of the baggage of life and not always easily managed. 
“‘The passions,” writes Hazlitt, “contract and warp the 
natural progress of life. They paralyze all of it that is 
not devoted to their tyranny and caprice. This makes 
the difference between the laughing innocence of child- 
hood, the pleasantness of youth and the crabbedness of 
age.’ “Each man is tempted,” says the Epistle of 
James, “when he is drawn away by his own lust.” Take 
the sex instinct, for instance. Julian Huxley has re- 
cently reminded us of the peculiar nature of the moral 
difficulty this instinct brings upon us. The sex in- 
stinct is a part of the complement of powers with which 
God has endowed us. In itself itis entirely noble. And 
yet its mismanagement has caused not only most of the 
misery of life but has spelled the doom of every civili- 
zation hitherto. That mismanagement is due chiefly 
to the fact that the sex function matures much earlier 
in our lives than our other mental functions. Its pow- 
ers are developed before the mental power of man to 
correlate the various functions of life reaches full ma- 
turity. The sex instinct demands an experience be- 
fore our powers to regulate that experience are ex- 
panded. Thus we have the temptations and problems 
of adolescence. The acquisitive instinct, which Jesus 
classified with the instinct of sex, as a power to work 


[68] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


mischief, comes upon us in much the same way. It 
surrounds the life with possessions before we have sta- 
bility of character and the disposition to benevolence 
fully developed. Between them they compose the major 
difficulties of the moral life. This source of tempta- 
tion is peculiarly potent in exactly the strongest nature, 
for obvious reasons. 

Again, the satanic suggestion that came to Jesus in 
the wilderness reminds us of another source of tempta- 
tion. The suggestion pressed upon the Christ was that 
He had the power to turn stones into bread or to fling 
Himself from the pinnacle of the temple and rise un- 
harmed. Having the power, why not use it? How 
often 


“Sight of means to do ill deeds 
Makes ill deeds done.” 


It is for this reason chiefly that wealth, particularly in 
the control of the young, spreads such harm. It puts 
at one’s disposal the means to do ill with a certain se- 
curity against social chastisement. It draws off the 
vitality of moral idealism latent in youth and robs its 
proud possessor of courage to renounce self in the in- 
terest of a nobler life. To a degree we are all tempted 
to give in because we ‘“‘can get away with it” as the say- 
ing of the street has it. Man’s growing ingenuity and 
capacity is undoubtedly making clean moral living more 
difficult. 

A fourth source of some of our most grievous temp- 
tations is the trysting place of our illicit companionships, 
It is a far cry indeed from the separatist tendency of 


[69] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


early Christian history to the imitative tendency of the 
present. In the early days a Christian kept to his own 
company; of two ancient worthies it was said, ““When 
they were let go they went unto their own company.” 
Roman society was avoided as a polluting stream of 
corruption. Friendships were found in the little and 
ever-enlarging circles of Christian disciples. So far as 
possible all manner of public intercourse with pagans 
was renounced. The theatre, the Coliseum, the games, 
the army and public office were hardly patronized by 
the Christians. Christian households such as the one 
described by Walter Pater in “Marius, the Epicurean” 
secured to those early followers of the Christ their 
friendships. This habit continued for several centuries. 
The part it contributed to the stability of the Christian 
movement and the strength of personal character re- 
mains to be computed. To-day the habit is different. 
A chain of companionships in business, amusement, 
politics and culture have completely enmeshed us. We 
do not test a man’s character for its Christian morality 
before we take him across the threshold of our homes. 
Even the kingdom of heaven is like a net cast into the 
sea, which gathers in all kinds. In the world of our 
social relationships wheat and tares grow side by side. 
So it will be to the day of judgment. Thus there have 
come into every life those evil communications which 
still corrupt good manners. Quite aside from the “‘con- 
federacies of vice” that we guiltily and deliberately en- 
ter upon we are beset with illicit companionships that 
make trial of our faith and morals day by day. 

A very distressing source of temptation is the loose- 


[70] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


ness of the social code. The conventional standard is 
always easy. It makes no exactions. It applauds what 
the morally enlightened condemn. It trims to our weak- 
nesses whereas conscience rebukes them. Whites and 
blacks turn to gray in the conventional code. It petri- 
fies the feeling for the right into a cold calculation of the 
proper. It resents moral excellence as much as moral 
indigence. It hurls mud at him who rises above the 
social standard as readily as it does at him who falls 
below it. It discourages moral well-doing as severely as 
it scorns indulgence. It crucifies Christ at the same 
time that it casts out Judas. Here is a temptation hard 
to overcome. Every impulse to be friendly, loyal and 
agreeable militates against the passion to excel. “The 
artist,’ says Schiller, “is the son of his age; but pity 
him if he is its pupil, or even its favorite!” It might 
as well be said of the Christian. Difficult as it always 
is we must fight the deadening influence of the social 
conventions as we would the ravaging progress of dis- 
ease. For it is a disease attacking the vitals of char- 
acter. | 
With these abundant sources of temptation before us 
the question at once springs to our minds “How can 
we overcome?” By what strategy can we meet these 
subtle wiles of the tempter? What defense can we 
erect against the aggressive onslaughts of evil often 
robed in the mantle of goodness? We meet the foe not 
by a petty contentment to win individual battles but by 
the strategy of a counter campaign. Battles may be 
lost. If we prosecute a general campaign we will win 


[71] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


not only individual battles but the victory of a vindi- 
cated character. 


Le 


In any general campaign for right living the first essen- 
tial is to have a dominant purpose. Against the odds 
of life a fixed purpose is the only sure prophecy of final 
conquest. It is the cohesive force which unifies and 
holds together the sum total of personal life forces. 
Turning to Schiller again we hear him saying, “But how 
is the artist to guard himself from the corruption of his 
time, which on every side assails him? By despising 
its decisions. Let him look upwards to his dignity and 
his mission. Not downwards to his happiness and his 
wants.”’ Evil desires perish for want of interest when 
the attention is held by a dominating purpose of benefi- 
cence and social usefulness. Timidity, such a fertile 
field of failure in the face of moral difficulty, vanishes 
when we are mastered by a great ambition. The critic 
writes of Whittier, “frail of body, poor, timid, un- 
taught, he had discovered, on reading Burns, that he too 
had a poet’s soul. He learned from William Lloyd 
Garrison the secret of losing one’s life and saving it, 
so that in becoming, in his own words ‘a man and not a 
mere verse maker’ he found in that surrender to the 
claims of humanity, the inspiration which transformed 
him into a poet.” What can rouse the dormant capaci- 
ties for great living so quickly as a dominant purpose? 
Under its commanding influence the dumb speak, the 
weak become strong and the morally lame walk. It 


[72] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


takes a Grant, the victim of laziness and drink, and 
transforms him into a hardened campaigner for vic- 
tory, who will “fight it out on this line if it takes all 
summer.” It so softens his soul that he pushes that 
victory on to peace and magnanimity. It endows the 
life with a conquering earnestness. Happy the young 
man or woman who early in life comes under the spell 
of a dominant purpose and permits life to be swayed 
by the commanding eloquence of that purpose. Many, 
if not most of the temptations are scattered in utter 
rout by that strategy. Jesus, by one of those homely 
figures that became majestic at his touch, insists that 
“he who putteth his hand to the plow and looketh back is 
not fit for the Kingdom of God.” By which He means 
to say that a mastering purpose claiming the undivided 
attention of the life is the only sure way to bring us to 
the Kingdom of God. It is they | 
“Who want while through blank life they dream along 
Sense to be right and passion to be wrong” 
that can’t be placed in the Kingdom of an achieved 
satisfaction. 

That purpose need not be specifically religious. It 
need not take one out of the secular, so-called, into the 
sacred pursuits of life. We are coming to realize that 
majestic souls whether saints or savants, prophets or 
politicians, men of God or men of business, have a sense 
of mission. “They act at times as if they knew,” says 
Hugo. They hold to an end, see a goal, pursue an 
ideal. So intent are they that they will not be diverted. 
A purpose dominates them. By that purpose are they 
kept as by a protecting providence. 


[73] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


III 


Next to a dominant purpose a dominant cause, a mas- 
tering movement, contributes much to our mastery of 
self. How many of us who find ourselves incapable 
of conceiving and carrying through a dominant purpose 
are yet able to lose ourselves with deliberation in some’ 
‘great cause set for us by a Christ-like personality? In 
another day it was the cause of abolition; more recently 
it was the cause of temperance; to-day it is the cause of 
world peace that pleads for our service and allegiance. 
Minor causes beckon us constantly. A person must be 
very dull indeed if he cannot find some worthy work 
of social helpfulness in his community which deserves 
his loyalty. To espouse a cause is to be a marked man. 
A certain repute for virtue attaches to one forthwith. 
Our characters are advertised, as it were. We must 
therefore live up to our repute. We are at once re- 
solved not to yield to any wrong that will unman us 
for our cause. Even Jesus cried out to the Father, “for 
their sakes I sanctify myself.” To live for a movement 
means to keep oneself fit for it. To wear the uniform 
of the consecrated is to make consecration easier. To 
carry the badge of virtue is often a charm against the 
allurements of vice. To march under the banner of 
righteousness withdraws us from the by-paths of un- 
righteousness. To lose our lives in a great mission is 
to find them in a great redemption. The mere sur- 
rounding of an environment that is friendly stimulates 
the growth of the good impulses. It is a positive way 
of meeting the issue of temptation. When you are 


[74] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


“Giving your body with a man-size will 
To every deed 
Doing each baneful task as though to fill 
Your spirit’s need” 


moral questions bring with them their own answers. 
Nothing that thwarts us in the fulfilment of our cause 
can be permitted. The simple shaft that honors Horace 
Mann bears the inscription that at once reveals his 
power and interprets his life: ‘‘Be ashamed to die until 
you have won some great victory for humanity.” 
When the winning of that victory dominates us temp- 
tation of any kind has little power over us. Truly to 
such “the Prince of this world cometh” but he hath 
nothing in us. 

One deeply suspects that much of our modern lax- 
ity in personal morality is due directly to the popular, 
if not official, renunciation of ideals that our country 
has made since the war. The statement is of course 
open to question. But whence this pride in loose living, 
this cynical indifference to great social wrong-doing 
if not from a slow-working yet deadly disbelief in great 
causes, mastering ideals, profound convictions, that has 
come over us? One is impressed with the mental pre- 
cocity of our young writers, to what end? Futility! 
Genius in every sphere seems bound to the wheel of 
futility if not that of avarice. Can it be that “a diffi- 
dence in the soul is creeping over the mind of this 
great sensual, avaricious America” of ours? What can 
redeem us but a return to the principles that made us 
great? Our past history is a record of great causes 
taken up by men and women mostly of small conse- 


[75] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


quence. Out of that came a national discipline that 
reached down into the life of the commonest man and 
woman. Out of that discipline came characters for the 
world to marvel at, Lincoln, Garrison, and the rest. 
Would any of them have reached great heights except 
by enlisting in a great cause? Give yourself to a great 
cause. It not only redeems life from insignificance and 
a crushing sense of futility but it reduces the power of 
temptation to a point where it is not dangerous. 


IV 


It is certain though that the greatest help in the mo- 
ment of temptation is a dominant friendship. ‘The 
power of friendship has been many times retold. Ga- 
maliel Bradford has written a group of biographies of 
recent Americans. Among them are the stories of the 
careers of two men differing in every way. They are 
Mark Twain and Robert E. Lee. His comment on the 
effect of these two lives upon him as he lived with them 
in his inner thought is revealing. “In going back to 
him (Mark Twain), says Bradford, “to write this 
portrait, I found the same portentous, shadowing dark- 
ness stealing over me that he spread before. [I lived 
for ten years with the soul of Robert E. Lee, and it 
really made a little better man of me. Six months of 
Mark Twain made a worse. I even caught his haunt- 
ing exaggeration of profanity. And Iam fifty-six years 
old and not very susceptible to infection. What can he 
not do to boys and girls of sixteen?’ The importance 
to character of adequate friendships is put beyond dis- 
pute by testimony such as this. 

76] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


What mother is there who has not warned her son 
against the making of wrong friendships? How often 
the story of a ruined life is the narrative of an evil 
companionship? More important even than the fleeing 
of these evil companionships is the making of helpful 
friendships. For their stabilizing effect cannot be over- 
stated. The Sanhedrin understood the boldness of 
Peter and John when they learned that “they had been 
with Jesus.’”’ One sees during the winter-storms on the 
Seine all manner of small craft put to rout. They can- 
not ply the turbulent waters with safety to ship and 
cargo. They are beaten to destruction by the violence 
of the flood. Once in a while, however, there passes a 
craft, seemingly no sturdier than the rest, and yet it 
moves on in safety. The secret of course is in a great 
cable in the middle of the stream to which the ship is 
lashed. It keeps its course held firm by iron chains, the 
violence of the waters notwithstanding. Even so do 
dominant friendships give us the victory over our 
troublesome temptations. “Our chief want in life,” 
says Emerson, “‘is somebody who shall make us do what 
wecan. This is the service of a friend. With him we 
are easily great. There is a sublime attraction in him 
to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings wide the 
doors of existence! What questions we ask of him! 
What an understanding we have! How few words are 
needed !” 

It is at this point that Jesus chiefly helps us in temp- 
tation. From Him we derive our dominant purpose; 
from Him springs the dominant cause that deserves our 
loyalty; in Him do we find what we most need, our 


[77] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


greatest friend. It is not a popular suggestion, the 
mystical friendship of Jesus, in an age of unscrupulous 
rationalizing. We have done, we say, with such me- 
dieval superstition. The only defense one has for press- 
ing the suggestion is that when we have done with the 
mystical friendship of Jesus, His unseen companionship, 
we have done with historic Christianity. Take from the 
pages of history the names of the men and women who 
wrought a good work upon us, sustained by the one 
conviction that Jesus was with them, and you leave 
those pages bare indeed. The Saint of Assisi, the Re- 
former Luther, the astronomer Newton, the poet 
Wordsworth, the scientist Fabre, the humanitarian 
Howard, the statesman Lincoln, and his great forerun- 
ner Garrison, all these and many others would go. 
What a daring emasculation of the past it would be! 
One recalls the vivid lines of Macaulay, “A people that 
takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote an- 
cestors will never achieve anything to be remembered 
with pride by remote posterity.” These remote Chris- 
tian ancestors of ours may yet possess the real secret of 
the victorious life. 

The friendship of Jesus is more than a sentimental 
relationship. Itisamoral compact. Weare his friends 
if we do the things He commands. The desire to be 
His friends helps us to do those things. Moreover, 
what Christ asks us to do He has already done; what we 
are expected to endure has by Him been endured. For 
we have not a high Priest who legislates from his pon- 
tifical seat and his sheltered life for our infirmities of 
will and conscience. Our High Priest has not only been 


[78] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


touched with a feeling of our infirmities but He has 
been tempted exactly as we are. The very knowledge of 
His endurance stiffens our own resistance. Men have 
endured to the very cross and beyond under the moving 
knowledge that Jesus traveled the same path before 
them. To say less is to falsify fact. 

Again, Jesus gives to the dictates of conscience the 
authority of personal experience. What we know we 
ought to do we are rallied to do when we contemplate 
the career of Christ. We are put in a mood to carry 
out the projects of our own conscience. It isn’t only 
that Jesus has endured what we are asked to endure but 
what is much more important, that He believes in us. 
That very faith gives us strength. No more amazing 
situation presents itself in the pages of history than this 
faith of Christ in common men. Says Glover, “no 
other teacher dreamed that common men could possess 
a tenth part of the moral grandeur and spiritual power 
which Jesus elicited from them—chiefly by believing in 
them.” Take the case of Peter. Christ knew the in- 
stability of the man. He even pointed out to him im- 
pending failure. And yet He kept on trusting him. He 
insisted that on him would depend the stabilizing of the 
apostolic band. 

But you say that that is plausible enough when the 
commanding personality of Jesus is physically present. 
But how can Jesus help me who have not the benefit of 
the forceful personal presence? There is point to the 
question. Fortunately it is abundantly answered in 
history. What so impressed the wise and the great of 
antiquity was the greatness of character of simple 


[79] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


people. Galen, one of the first physicians, a scientist 
and a philosopher, a man whose authority was supreme 
in the realm of medicine to the middle of the sixteenth 
century, remarked upon this excellence of character in 
simple Christian people. He knew common people for 
what they were. The best of them were none too good. 
It was the very few, the aristocrats, that in that ancient 
day achieved excellence. Galen’s own words were that 
only a philosopher was capable of moral goodness. And 
yet he was moved to write in extravagant language of 
the self-control, purity and glad devotion to a standard 
of virtue that surpassed the best of the philosophers, of 
these common Christian people. That was one hundred 
and fifty years after Christ. Under the dominance of 
this Master who. believed in them and thought goodness 
and self-control possible for them, these men and 
women came to exactly that standard of life. What 
Shakespeare says of King Henry as he goes from regi- 
ment to regiment on the eve of the great conflict might 
well be said of Christ: 


‘ 


‘.. . Every wretch, pining and pale before, 
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks 


A little touch of Harry in the night.” 


To say that we can’t relate ourselves in a similarly 

vital way to the historic Christ, who is by that very 

token, the living Christ, is to pretend that we must fail 

where others have succeeded. Quite aside from any 

fantastic notions of mystical oneness with Him there 

remains the very substantial fact that real men and 
[80] 


HOW JESUS HELPS US IN TEMPTATION 


women who cared about character have “plucked com- 
fort’ from His looks, the more so that the relationship 
was set up in the secret places of the heart. The final 
help then comes from a spiritual traffic carried on with 
the Master of life. 


[8r] 


VI 
THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


Romans 1:7 “To all that are in Rome—called to be 
saints.” 


S': PAUL lived in a day of accumulating disasters. 
The golden age of Augustus had given way to the 
leaden age of Nero. Civilization was running down. 
Triumphant wrong was presiding over a social order 
reeking with moral corruption. Men and women were 
“receiving in themselves the recompense of their error 
which was due.” The first chapter of Romans is a 
vivid portrayal of a doomed and dying social life. 
Whether one accepts Oswald Spengler’s verdict that 
the soul of western civilizaton is in full decay and that 
from now on the facts of our social life will be zoologi- 
cal incidents only, or not, there is a growing suspicion 
abroad that all is not well with us. Our wise men shake 
their heads as the newspapers headline new tales of 
wrong again in triumph. The health-loving spirit of 
youth is in open revolt against the moral diet served up 
by the elders. The literature of gloom is alarmingly 
abundant. The apostles of hope are strangely silent. 
Corruption in high places remains curiously uncon- 
demned. Certainly these data of despair stimulate an 
alert study of St. Paul’s approach to the solution of a 


[82] 


THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


social situation which, if it be more pronounced is not 
wholly dissimilar from our present situation. 

St. Paul is calling for the kind of people needed in a 
dying world, a world that has all the symptoms of moral 
exhaustion. He is making a blood test of civilization 
for the kind of character and competence needed for the 
restoration of hope and the renewal of life. One may 
well imagine Paul reviewing the past of the race. He 
calls up one by one the kind of men and women who 
held the high places of power, who won the self- 
renouncing, suffering, sacrificing loyalty of plain people 
only to be found incompetent, impotent, unworthy: only 
to leave a tangled, disordered and wrecked society. The 
politician and the prophet; the priest and the autocrat, 
these had in turn been tried and found wanting in char- 
acter, intelligence, vision and high purpose. The mind 
of Paul settles on the saint, a new kind of person since 
Jesus Christ. Why not try the saint? Why not save a 
dying world by means of a living sainthood? The 
experiment is worth while. Paul calls for saints. “To 
all that are in Rome—called to be saints.” 


I 


The word saint brings up curious ideas in the mind. 
It calls back an unsatisfying picture of a thin face, 
a spare and lean body, strange dress and a meditative 
manner of life. Underneath it all is written in bold 
letters the damning word “unreal.” We remember Ten- 
nyson’s poem-picture of Simon Stylites on his sixty- 


[83] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


foot pole. Frankly we are not encouraged to yield much 
hope to such a figure. 

“Saint” was a common word in St. Paul’s day. It 
meant simply ‘‘a good person.” True, he was not a 
“goody good” person. The sickly figure of medieval 
art has really nothing in common with St. Paul’s idea 
of the saint. The saint was an alive person. “Grand, 
rough old Martin Luther” was Browning’s reaction to 
a saint. Of him at thirty-eight a contemporary wrote: 
“Eyes flashing and sparkling like a star so you could 
hardly stand their gaze! A friendly and accessible man! 
His earnestness was so mingled with joy and kindliness 
that it was a joy to live with him.” Our mental preju- 
dice against the saint needs revision very badly. Art, 
in the employ of priest-craft and politics, has given us 
a maliciously distorted picture of the saint. 

Called to be saints, to be good people, that is St. 
Paul’s hope for a dying world. The good life has re- 
demptive power. A candidate for president of the 
United States was recently quoted as saying that he’d 
rather have the support of a certain Methodist camp- 
meeting than the backing of the smartest politicians. 
Wrong never wins except the good people are first given 
a moral anesthetic of high-sounding political phrases. 
“Tf twelve such people could hold together for one ten, 
year,’ wrote Burne-Jones to Mary Gladstone, “they 
could change the face of the world. Twelve such men 
did hold together once and the face of the world was 
changed.”” A Savonarola in Florence, a Wesley in 
England, and a Garrison in America are bringers of 
renewal of social life and corporate health. Their sig- 


[84] 


a 


THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


nificance can not be overlooked in an estimate of the 
forces that change life. God is perpetually invading 
the world through good people. Redemption, though an 
old fact, becomes a new social experience every time a 
redeemed life is released among us. 

When Saul, the empire builder of Israel, found him- 
self in trouble, when difficulties were mounting and 
calamities multiplying, he suddenly felt a decisive need 
for help. He had been a bad man, disobeying God and 
dishonoring man. Samuel, the prophet, who had both 
selected and anointed Saul to be king, had tried to steer 
him right, to be a conscience for him. Saul openly re- 
jected and grossly dishonored him. Samuel was dead 
and the empire was in danger. Saul needed counsel. 
He went in disguise to the witch of Endor. Hear him 
now: “Bring me up Samuel.” I am not interested in 
the reality of witches or the power of the living to talk 
with the dead. There is a moral aspect to the story. 
Saul is crying for the good man that he had repelled. 
The only reply he got was, “Jehovah hath done unto 
thee as he spake by me.” Strange testimony to the re- 
demptive force of the good life! 

A good life is like the rock in the desert, holding back 
the sand that the plants may grow in its shelter. What 
a damaging biography is hidden in that line written of 
a certain distinguished modern statesman: “He is like 
a beech tree, majestic, magnificent, beautiful, but noth- 
ing can grow in its shade.” A group of younger gradu- 
ates had returned to their college for commencement. 
They had been “out” a dozen years or more. The con- 
versation turned upon the work of a certain professor 


[85] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


whose resignation had lately been rejected. They 
agreed that he taught them little in his department ; that 
in fact he was a very poor teacher. But said one of 
them, “he sharpened my taste for the fine and the genu- 
ine.” It was good to have him on a college campus. 
Humanity will never become apostate so long as there 
are saints, that is good people. Good people live for 
others just as prophets speak for others and philoso- 
phers think for others, not by conscious design but be- 
cause they can’t help it. 


IT 


Horace Mann, in the words that are inscribed on the 
shaft erected in his honor on the campus of Antioch 
College, rallies us to “be ashamed to die until we have 
won some victory for humanity.” But to how many 
is it given to win victories for humanity? Our parts 
are not cast in great plays. Purple and fine linen, worn 
in kings’ palaces, are not for us. Our house is by the 
side of a very dusty road, a side road perhaps. Great 
events do not turn on our lives as an axis. Well, the 
saint is not coached for a great part nor is he con- 
ditioned by a public career. Said Emerson’s squirrel 
to the mountain: 


“Tf I cannot carry mountains on my back 
Neither can you crack a nut.” 


“Called to be saints,” not some famous ‘‘man of the 

hour’ but some good person in the place assigned by 

circumstance! Of the great company that stood before 
[86] 


THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


the throne in the vision of the writer of “Revelation” 
the only biography one could write is one of three 
words: ‘They are worthy.” 

Again and again we need to recover our appreciation 
of humble fidelity to the tested sanctities. We are be- 
ginning to suspect that what holds in our land to-day 
is not the greatness and goodness of our leaders, for 
they have proved themselves blunderers and wicked 
men, but the widespread fidelity of common citizens. 
It is again the ten righteous men that keep us from the 
fate of Sodom. It was Luther’s glory that he showed 
men and women convincingly that “plain devotedness 
to duty” is more to be desired and praised than the holi- 
ness and asceticism of monks and nuns. 

Beware then that humility which is the greatest pride; 
that humility which tells you that your life is of no 
importance. The good life, irrespective of place, is 
always important. St. Paul calls us to be saints in our 
day. Every Samuel has a Saul around somewhere. 


III 


How do we come by the good life? How can we 
make our election sure? How realize this sainthood? 

Goodness, like love and truth, remains perhaps inde- 
finable. It too, again like love and truth, happens to 
us. Says Canon Streeter, ““We must have the habit of 
scepticism about all the possessions of our own mind 
if we are to let truth happen to us; we must utterly rid 
ourselves of the desire to be proved right.” So, it may 
be, do we come by goodness. When we bring an alert, 


[87] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


attentive, sensitive soul to the facts of life, a soul 
stripped bare of moral chauvinism and Pharisaic pride, 
we may well find ourselves growing better. Certain it 
is that goodness can’t be either inherited, bought or con- 
ferred. The rich young ruler discovered that for us. 
Goodness is not the number of goals we make but a 
way of playing the game. It is not conditioned by 
temperament, inheritance or social advantage. Good- 
ness is a state of character we happen to acquire as a 
by-product of the enterprise of right daily living. 
“There is a neighbor within,’ says Thoreau, “who is 
incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we 
wait for a neighbor without to tell us of some false, 
easier way.’’ We put ourselves in the way of having 
goodness happen to us when we live by conscience. 
Conscience after all can be our only sure guide to good- 
ness for it is its interpreter. “We may argue it into 
silence,’ as has been suggested, “but its silence is not 
to be mistaken for approval. The verdict remains. 
There can be no debate and there is no appeal. Con- 
science is a judge and not an advocate.” To the re- 
quest of the young man “‘what good thing shall I do?” 
Jesus makes sharp reply, “why askest thou me concern- 
ing that which is good?” As if the Master meant to 
imply that no external authority can possibly take the 
place of an alive and healthy conscience in the regula- 
tion of the moral life. Quite aside from the undoubted 
fact that our conscience needs correction in the light of 
Jesus’ character, spirit and teaching, this further fact 
is also clear, namely, that our conscience is our avail- 
able and unerring guide to the realities of the good 
[88] 


THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


life. The mariner’s compass needs correction too but 
it is still the only guide to successful navigation. 


IV 


Of much more importance are the tests we may em- 
ploy to measure ourselves for the hidden deposit of good 
life laid up in the years of living. Whereas goodness 
in the abstract may always remain indefinable the good 
life never leaves us in doubt. We react to it as nat- 
urally as elements held by chemical affinity. How then 
can I measure myself? How can I assess myself in 
respect of the good life? What is the glory of saint- 
hood? 

A wise old professor said to me as I was about to 
enter the ministry, “Young man, there will always be 
plenty of liars in any congregation to tell you what a 
wonderful preacher you are. Pay no attention to them. 
The only honest measure you have is this, “do they call 
you in time of trouble.’ ”’ It strikes me as a sound test 
for the good life generally. ‘Do they call you in time 
of trouble?” We touch here the very fundamentals of 
redemptive character, sympathy, genuineness, leisure for 
another’s woes, imagination, self-giving. The Car- 
thaginians said of Hannibal, “we vehemently desired 
him in the day of battle.” The pathetic plea of Mar- 
tha as she met the Master was “we know that if thou 
hadst been here my brother had not died.” 

“Do they call you in time of trouble?” This is the 
first test of the good life. How many of our clever, 
witty, learned friends are positively embarrassing in 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


time of trouble! How many of our rich, aggressive, 
influential friends repel us in time of trouble! How 
often we turn to some humble, broken, discouraged 
soul for a lift in time of trouble! In that moment we 
are paying silent tribute to the reality of the good life. 
By the same token may we gauge our own goodness 
quite accurately and without the faintest hint of Phari- 
saism. 

The good life sends out a ray of hope through the 
thickening clouds of sorrow, suffering and sin. Like 
the pearl, to which Jesus likened the good life, its 
lustre is brought out best against a black background. 
The good life is a life of hope, not in the sense of the 
popular optimism of the modern “grinning gospel,” but 
in the sense of the apostle Paul who knew that “all 
things work together for good to them that love God.” 
It is a quality of the good life to make all things work 
together just that way. Despair is never its final ver- 
dict on life. It continues 


“To hope till hope creates 
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” 


It is this aggressive hopefulness which prompted the 
same apostle to say “in hope are we saved.” 

Intelligent, open-eyed hopefulness is the major need 
of the hour. Men and women who can see with the 
prophet Ezekiel the “spirit of life’ in the modern 
wheel-civilization, who can urge the human values upon 
us in a way that will compel us to honor them and give 
them their rightful place, such are the Samuels we are 
calling for. It is creative hope we want and the good 


[90] 


THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


life is our only source of such hope. To have it is to 
have a sure token of goodness. It is the second test of 
sainthood. 

The good life, again, is quite clear of any spirit of 
resentment. It never bears a grudge. It sets the best 
possible interpretation upon the conduct of its fellows. 
It may go so far as to invent flattering interpretations 
with an eye to ultimate redemption. The good life has 
nothing in common with the calculating cynicism that 
sets a price upon every character and proceeds to offer 
the price. It continues to do handsomely by men in the 
very hour of betrayal. It will not admit even to itself 
that men are as wicked as they sometimes prove them- 
selves to be. For this reason it redeems them from their 
wickedness, once and again. 

These are more than high-sounding phrases for plat- 
form effect. I know that we rarely approach their ideal. 
The more’s the pity! We do not live redemptively, we 
do not live the good life until we have ‘‘washed the feet 
of Judas” on the night of betrayal. It was an Ameri- 
can negro, George Marion McClellan, who recalled us 
to this test of the good life. 


“Christ washed the feet of Judas! 
Yet all his lurking sin was bare to him, 
His bargain with the priest, and more than this, 
In Olivet, beneath the moonlight dim, 
Aforehand knew and felt his treacherous kiss. 


‘And so if we have ever felt the wrong 
Of trampled rights, of caste, it matters not; 
Whate’er the soul has felt or suffered long, 
O heart, this one thing should not be forgot: 
Christ washed the feet of Judas.” 


[or] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


More specifically perhaps, we can ask ourselves a few 
very pertinent questions. 

Can we rejoice in the success of a rival? Or does a 
rival’s discomfiture bring secret satisfaction? Edwin 
Booth defined a Christian as one who can rejoice in the 
success of a rival. Jesus called John the Baptist the 
greatest born of woman. It was John who had said 
“Tie must increase, I must decrease.” There is a bril- 
liant story hidden in the pages of the history of Eng- 
lish Literature. Sir Walter Scott had been England’s 
greatest poet. He loved popularity as few men love it 
and quite honestly so. Then came Byron with his be- 
euiling verse. A certain reviewer promptly announced 
that since Byron, Scott can no longer be called Eng- 
land’s greatest poet. The reviewer was Scott himself. 
He gave up poetry and turned to the novel sadly con- 
fessing “Byron beat me.” But it was he who first con- 
vinced England that Byron beat him. 

Do we see more than we tell? It has been suggested 
that God gave us two eyes and only one tongue that 
we might see more than we tell. It is a test that cuts 
very deep. The noble Stevenson reminded us that the 
greatest courage is that courage which keeps us silent, 
when we have no kind word to speak. It is the courage 
of the saint. Iago told more than he saw. He drove 
Othello mad with jealousy and brought on tragedy. 
How many of the tragedies of life spring from the ma- 
licious interpretations we put upon the facts of life? 
Or to vary the figure, how often our own hands are 
dirty with the mud we have thrown, to use the phrase of 
Hugo. 

[92] 


THE VALUE OF THE GOOD LIFE 


How do we react to evil? Does it leave us com- — 
placent and indifferent? There is no redemptive power | 
in that. Or does it arouse in us a mighty indignation | 


which issues in cleansing social effort? There is a 
purity which is like white blotting paper, soaking up 
whatever it touches, soiled by the contacts of life. 
There is another purity which is like chlorine, which 
becomes a cleansing agent in every filthy corner. The 
latter is the purity of the saint. It is this aggressive 
goodness that saves. More distressing than the scan- 
dals in the high places of our public life is the complete 
absence of social indignation that follows them. Verily 
our times need the calling out of the saints. 

“Called to be saints!’ The need of the hour is 
sainthood dramatized in us. To continue our clamor 
for new leaders in politics, religion, industry and edu- 
cation smacks of insincerity. For a dying world saints 
are needed. To withold the effort at sainthood is to 
make the great refusal, to practice spiritual evasion. 
Nothing short of a moral uprising can save us now. 
That uprising must begin within. We are rallied by 
Paul to the daring adventure of redeeming society by 
the manifest power of our goodness, 


[93] 


; 


Vil 
SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER 


Acts 4:19-20 “But Peter and John answered and said 
unto them, Whether it 1s right in the sight of God to 
hearken unto you rather than unto God, judge ye: 
for we cannot but speak the things which we saw 
and heard.” 


I 


BVIOUSLY these men have some hidden source of 

courage and strength. Two “unlearned and igno- 

rant men” openly defy the supreme court of the land. 

Rulers whose very names struck terror in the hearts of 

the common people, Annas and Caiaphas, John and 

Alexander, are now not only faced but defied by Peter 
and John. 

But what had they done? What misdeed caused 
them to fall into the “fell clutch” of the law? They had 
taught the people. Their words of teaching were tak- 
ing root in the minds of the people. In due time a new 
crop of social judgments would spring up. Therefore 
abridgement of the rights of these “unlearned and ig- 
norant men” seemed highly advisable. When will of- 
ficialdom learn that you can’t intimidate an idea, that 
you can’t imprison a thought, that you can’t suppress 
a conviction! Human history has been needlessly 


[94] 


SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER 


bloody for want of this knowledge. Our present social 
experience is needlessly bitter for the same reason. 


“For every soul denied the right to grow 
Beneath the flag, will be its secret foe.” 


There could be only one response to this attempt at 
intimidation. Peter and John made it when they de- 
fied the rulers. Here then we come upon the first test 
of the power of conviction Jesus is able to evoke. The 
test is the more remarkable in the light of the history 
of at least one of these men, Peter. 

The last glimpse we get of Peter before the crucifix- 
ion is of a man contemptible in every way, craven- 
hearted and blasphemous. He is renouncing all his 
former loyalty to Jesus. He is driving the first cruel 
nail of denial into, not the body, but the soul of the 
Master. He is joining himself to the company of the 
coarse who can jest at the wounds injustice inflicts on 
the righteous one; that dull company who in their stu- 
pidity will not see that 


“Men betrayed are mighty and great are the 
wrongfully dead.” 


Peter in the palace of the high priest is a sorry figure 
indeed, in sharpest contrast to the Peter we see before 
the Sanhedrin. 

What happened meanwhile to transform Peter? By 
what spiritual alchemy is the stuff of this man’s soul 
transmuted from base to pure metal? What powerful 
reaction brought him back, bold and brave, to sway the 
crowd at Pentecost, to defy the Council, to write his 


[95] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


name permanently in our history? His source of per- 
sonal power promises rich blessing to every one of us 
if we can make it out. 

Between Peter’s denial of Christ and his persuasive 
sermon at Pentecost four things happened to which one 
can fairly trace the transformation in Peter. 


II 


The first of these was his penitence. Peter re- 
pented of his sin. He wept bitterly in humiliation and 
shame, a manly thing to do. It was said of Voltaire, 
“the was punished through what he sneered at,’”’ mean- 
ing Joan of Arc. There is something majestic about 
Carlyle’s description of the futility of Voltaire. That 
such genuine acumen should accomplish next to noth- 
ing! He never overcame his will to sneer. Peter too 
had sneered at none other than Christ but he overcame 
his sneer. In that victory is the first source of his 
power. His tears of repentance moistened his parched 
soul and gave it fertility once more. He faced his past 
with honesty and overcame it by “getting a future out 
of it.” He did not try to “poultice his conscience” and 
take the sting out of it. He accepted with manly forti- 
tude the full responsibility of his meanness. 

One could, with little difficulty, find plausible ex- 
cuses for Peter. He was, for instance, no worse than 
the rest. The other disciples had all fled. They, too, 
had denied Jesus. But to be no worse than others is to 
be at least as bad as your contemporaries. The imita- 


[96] 


SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER 


tion of our contemporaries and the self-satisfaction it 
produces is the major indictment against our modern 
moral character. Again, was not Judas more vile than 
he? True, Judas was more vile than Peter. What 
comfort can Peter derive from the greater guilt of his 
fellow disciple? How often we shield our own guilt by 
openly denouncing the supposedly greater iniquity of 
others? Peter dallied with none of these malicious de- 
vices, these satanic sophistries. “Vicarious penitence” 
was not in his complement of vices. And in that atti- 
tude he found strength; from it he gained courage. His 
very penitence became the power that drove him for- 
ward. 

Long since Ruskin noted the readiness with which we 
admit any amount of sin in the aggregate but refuse to 
acknowledge even the slightest sin in the concrete. But 
to pray for forgiveness is merely “going through the 
motions,” unless we are ready to drag our own specific 
sin before God and seek its forgiveness. When was 
the prodigal strong, when he sought and won his fath- 
er’s beneficence that he might go and squander not only 
that beneficence but a good deal besides? or when he 
“came to himself,’”’ faced his abominable misdoing and 
confessed it? Penitence is a source of strength. 


III 


Peter had caught a vision of Christ. 
Jesus appeared to Peter after the resurrection. That 
vision of the Christ became an undoubted source of 


[97] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


personal power. Lest we discount the value of this 
experience because of a fixed conviction against the 
miracle of the resurrection, as is the fashion among so 
many, let us bear in mind that all the earliest docu- 
ments contain the record of the resurrection. The 
miracle of the resurrection must be approached from an 
historical and not a metaphysical viewpoint. The real 
question is not “Could it happen?” but “Did it happen?” 

What happened when Peter met Jesus is not fully 
known. The outcome we do know. Peter came from it 
full of understanding and determination. He was from 
that day forth to be not a hireling but a shepherd. The 
Kingdom now became a thing to be struggled for and 
died for. What is more important, his moral capacity 
for earnest work was greatly enlarged. Perhaps “a 
word did it,’’ as in the case of Savonarola, who refused 
ever after to tell what that word was. Enough that it 
happened. 

Parallels are not wanting in more recent history. 
Witness the transformation in that writer who, at the 
bandying request of an infidel, undertook to write a 
novel of Jesus, properly belittling His place in the world. 
The novel was written. The writer was Lew Wallace 
and his book “Ben Hur.’ But the book turned out to 
be against not only the infidel Ingersoll’s notion but also 
against the writer’s intention. The vision of Jesus, 
gained in the study of His life, did it. 

Witness the transformation in the life of that emi- 
nent scholar, Albert Schweitzer. To-day he makes a 
threefold claim to distinction. His name first won our 
notice through the publication of a remarkable book, 


[98] 


SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER 


“The Quest of the Historical Jesus.” The book was 
not wholly complimentary to Christ. It made Him out 
a hopeless apocalyptic, slightly deluded though actively 
honest. Its closing sentences were these: ‘“‘He comes 
to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the 
lake-side, he came to those men who knew him not. 
He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me?’ 
and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfil for our 
time. He commands, and to those who obey him, 
whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in 
the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall 
pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mys- 
tery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is.” 

Schweitzer’s second claim to fame is his unrivaled 
genius as interpreter of Bach and as master of the or- 
gan. His tour through England a short while ago was 
one succession of triumphs concluding with a memor- 
able recital at Westminster Abbey. To-day Albert 
Schweitzer is in equatorial Africa, a medical missionary 
among the black folks on the river Ogowe. He used his 
musical talent to pay the way to a doctor’s certificate 
and has now ended the quest for the historical Jesus by 
finding Him in “the toils, the conflicts and the suffer- 
ings’ “on the edge of the primeval forest.” 

Witness the conversion of that atheist of atheists, the 
brilliant Italian lawyer, poet and man of letters, Papini. 
Trained in the dismal dogmas of atheism, convinced in 
disbelief, a simple study and telling of the story of Jesus 
wrought a complete transformation. Small wonder that 
his “Life of Christ” has stirred all Europe, and America 
too. He met Jesus and again the Galilean conquered. 


[99] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Who can tell the added personal power that would 
come to most of us if we were as zealous for an ade- 
quate vision of the Christ as we are about the daily ex- 
periences of “Mutt and Jeff’ or the annual standing of 
our favorite home run hitter. How much modern moral 
impotence and spiritual sterility is due to an improper 
perception of the fact, personality and meaning of 
Jesus Christ! Christianity will not get itself expressed 
in our modern world until Jesus gets Himself more fully 
understood. No greater guilt rests upon us than the 
guilt of refusing to fully understand the life and pur- 
pose of the Master. 


IV 


The Holy Spirit had come upon Peter. The story of 
the Pentecostal happening explains the unusual phe- 
nomena by the pregnant phrase, “they were all filled 
with the Holy Spirit.” 

To modern ears Spirit of Holiness conveys a deeper 
meaning than does the term Holy Spirit. Peter came 
to be moved by the Spirit of Holiness, that spirit which 
seeks to make good will the dominant aim in life; that 
spirit which seeks to realize the full intention of Jesus; 
that spirit which consumes the life in the endeavor to 
establish the Kingdom in every area of our life. 

We are familiar with the spirit of business. Men 
will risk health, home and life itself in its service. 
Every move means a thrill. It drives its servants to 
worry and brings them to an early grave but it gives 
meaning and zest to life. We are familiar with the 

[100] 


SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER 


spirit of patriotism. It makes men eloquent and gives 
them power to sway thousands who formerly were 
dumb before scores. It makes men daring, even savage 
in their bravery, who formerly couldn’t kill a chicken. 
We are familiar with the spirit of pleasure. In its 
service, and what task-master can be more cruel, young 
men and women by the thousand will ‘throw their 
bodies down for God to plow them under.” In like 
manner had the Spirit of Holiness come upon Peter. 
Another Apostle, who, too, had come under its in- 
fluence, cried out, “I live, yet not J, Christ liveth in 
me! 

Under the dominance of this spirit fear fled, courage 
returned; self-interest vanished, Christ loomed large; 
danger and difficulty could not intimidate, only chal- 
lenge. In some recently published letters of Livingstone, 
that Great-Heart of the nineteenth century, comments 
in bitterness on the enthusiasm and consuming passion 
of men of business who dare the utmost in Africa while 
messengers of Christ remain timid and undone. How 
can God bless passionless endeavor? What results can 
we get from despondent effort? There is no power in 
purposeless activity. Only the Spirit of Holiness, con- 
trolling and directing our total life, can pour power into 
our program and make our cause effective. 

Undoubtedly the major cause of our disloyalty is the 
conflict that is set up in our own lives between these 
various spirits of holiness, business, patriotism, and 
pleasure. Lesser loyalties have drawn off our spiritual 
power and modified our loyalty to the Spirit of Holi- 
ness in Christ. A main source of the contemporary 


[ror | 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


weakness of the Christian effort in our social life is this 
assignment of a secondary place to the loyalty to Jesus. 
To the Christian the issue ought to be clear. He can 
never be content to let his loyalty to Christ accept orders 
from the spirit of business or patriotism or pleasure. 
If modern life drives a wedge between two loyalties the 
vote of the Christian must always be given to that 
loyalty which to him can be the only supreme one, 

The issue may mean sacrifice for us. It did for 
Peter. The duty is clear; the issue belongs to God. 


Vv 


Peter was given a definite task. The record of his 
interview with the Master by the seaside indicates 
clearly enough that Peter is destined to become the 
active leader of the little group of followers. Once be- 
fore Jesus had asked him to establish the brethren when 
he came through his own difficulty. The very definite- 
ness of the task became a source of power to the apostle. 
Jesus rules men by trusting them, helps them by believ- 
ing in them. He still believes in them when they have 
given Him just cause for doubt. 

God’s call to service is not nearly so anonymous as 
most of us make it out to be. How often have we 
stifled the inner voice because it was too clear and defi- 
nite for comfort. Those times are moments of defeat. 
Our moments of victory are the times when we accept 
the call and render the service. It may be no more 
than speaking a word for Jesus to some relative or 

[ 102] 


“SOURCES OF PERSONAL POWER 


friend. It may be no more than the display of enough 
courage to remain silent when we have no definite word 
of kindness to speak. It may be a call to renounce 
ambition, even wealth, in order that we may have that 
equipment of personality which can make us fit for 
leadership. In each case it is the acceptance of a defi- 
nite task that makes us “more than conquerors.” 

In a moving passage in Willa Cather’s “One of 
Ours,” she describes her principal character, Claude 
Wheeler, in a moment of meditation on the State House 
steps at Denver. He is contemplating the storm in the 
breast of youth, the pain of being young and full of 
purpose. Says the author of him, “it was a storm that 
died down at last—but what a pity not to do anything 
with it, a waste of power for it was a kind of power.” 
To us all has come, time and again, that storm in the 
breast, that distinct prompting to a definite service, to 
a concrete expression of our inner loyalty. God forbid 
that it should ever be smothered! 

These are the experiences that aroused Peter. These 
are the sources of his personal power. They can 
serve us equally well. The important issue is our own 
stirring up. Let our prayer to God be for any experi- 
ence so that we will be vividly recalled to persuasive, 
effective service. As Stevenson in the “Celestial Sur- 
geon’’ pled, so plead we: 


“Tf I have faltered more or less 
In my great task of happiness; 


If I have moved among my race 
And shown no glorious morning face; 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


If dreams from happy human eyes 
Have moved me not; if morning skies, 


Books and my food, and summer rain 
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain: 


Lord, thy most painted pleasure take 
And stab my spirit broad awake: 


Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, 
Choose then, before that spirit die, 


A piercing pain, a killing sin, 
And to my dead heart run them in.” 


[104] 


Vill 
FINDING GOD UNREAL 


St. John 14:8 “Philip saith unto lam, Lord show us the 
Father, and tt sufficeth us.” 


i Rea plaintive request of Philip raises the one ques- 
tion that is resident in every breast; it points the 
one problem of religion from which all problems radi- 
ate. Our hold on reality is slipping. We are not sure 
of God. But as Professor David Cairns has so acutely 
remarked in his thoughtful book, “The Reasonableness 
of the Christian Faith:’ “The one vital necessity of 
religion is to be sure of God.” Our prayer again is 
“show us the Father and it sufficeth us.” Truly “the 
greatest need of our civilization is an absorbing con- 
viction as to the existence of God. Can we be sure 
that he is? Is there reason for faith in him, reliance 
upon him, and obedience to his laws? ‘These are ques- 
tions in comparison to which everything else seems 
trivial.” These sober words of Dean Shailer Mathews 
evoke a genuine response in most of us. 

Of the many vital matters that engage the thought 
and give content to the teaching of Jesus none takes 
precedence over his constant effort to make vivid the 
reality of God. He taxed his vocabulary to define the 
nature of his own sense of reality; he employed parable, 


[105] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


simile, metaphor, with the greatest skill in order to im- 
part to his friends and followers a like sense of reality. 
Essentially the Master sought not to pronounce dogmas 
of faith but to help people believe. 

We have on the one hand a very genuine yearning for 
a God who is real, whose fellowship is our very life, 
while on the other hand we experience a devastating 
sense of the unreality of the very God that we crave. 
The difficulty has been attacked in a variety of ways. 


I 


Durant Drake suggests that religion does not neces- 
sarily need a God to maintain its hold on life. He cites 
Buddhism as proof of his contention. But is not Bud- 
dhism more a denial of religious passion than a fulfil- 
ment of it, an evasion of the problem rather than a 
solution? Agnosticism makes precisely the same effort. 
It, too, seeks to be religious without bothering about the 
reality of God. In support of that attitude the names 
of a glorious company of great men can be recited. 
It has attracted such brilliant intellectuals as Huxley, 
Mark Twain, and perhaps H. G. Wells. But agnosti- 
cism is like the glory of the setting sun, dazzling, bril- 
liant, with a hundred hues of mental beauty but utterly 
cold and sterile, stimulating nothing into life and 
growth. 

A second effort to solve the difficulty has been made 
by exalting humanitarianism and the service of our 
fellowmen into the position formerly occupied by God. 

[ 106] 


FINDING GOD UNREAL 


This attempt recognizes fully man’s passion for God 
and seeks to satisfy it by giving him a pretended God. 
It is an attempt, as Myers has so well said “to satisfy 
the longing of the soul for God by spelling humanity 
with a large H.” It may fairly be asked how long such 
an effort can sustain itself with the object of its ser- 
vice as the only inspiration? Only the other day 
Charles Henry Dickinson issued a most engaging book 
“The Religion of the Social Passion,’ in which he 
quite frankly tries to make out a case for a religious 
experience in which humanity is the only God that is 
needed. Who, in the long run serves humanity best? 
Is it those who nourish themselves on the simple motive 
of service, who derive their enthusiasm for their fel- 
lowmen from an abstract ideal of brotherhood, or is it 
that singular company of men and women who, like 
St. Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth Fry and General Booth, 
seek to get humanity to God. The question of For- 
sythe cannot be easily set aside, “Is our first duty to 
humanity not to commit it to God?” Until we are sure 
of God can religion be more than an ethical effort? 
Any “reconstruction of religion” that leaves that issue 
untouched may be said to exploit the religiousness of 
man rather than to expound the reality of God. 

Weare never going to get a Christian social order, a 
world such as Jesus conceived, human relationships 
sanctified by the morality of the Christ, until we achieve 
a relationship with God such as Jesus had. The Ser- 
mon on the Mount was not the greatest thing Jesus gave 
mankind, great as it was. The greatest thing He gave 
us was the inspiration of a life that was so knit with 


[107] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


God in fellowship, so shot through with the certainty of 
God, so convinced of God’s reality that nothing re- 
mained impossible in the way of moral achievement. It 
brought to His life faith to move mountains ; it put into 
His soul courage to endure the cross; it transfigured 
His whole being. Ideals of morality with Him were 
always secondary to an experience of moral living. 
The capacity for moral living sprang from a fruitful 
experience of fellowship with God. We need in this 
day, as much as Jesus needed it, spiritual help more 
than we need moral enlightenment, or social vision. 
We need personalities by the thousands who not only 
believe the moral ideals of the Gospels but who are pro- 
jected into life with force sufficient to clothe those ideals 
in reality. Such changes come not from the mere con- 
templation of the beautiful, the good, and the true. 
They come alone from the life-giving fellowship with a 
God who is real. Matthew Arnold, uncertain though 
he seemed to be of God, touched the nerve of our diffi- 
culty in a few illuminating lines: 


"Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green; 
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen 
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. 


I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 

“Til and overworked, how fare you in this scene?” 
“Bravely!’ said he; “for I of late have been 

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.” 


There are four main reasons why God seems so un- 
real to most of us. 


[108] 


FINDING GOD UNREAL 


II 


The first of these reasons has been skilfully exploited 
by L. P. Jacks in his justly popular book “Religious 
Perplexities.” Says he, ‘There is no worldly interest 
which has not been anxious to secure God for an ally. 
In all ages the attempt has been made to domesticate 
the idea of God to the secular purposes of individuals 
and of groups. If we examine the current forms of 
the idea we may observe the marks of this domesticat- 
ing process at many points. For example, the idea of 
God as the sovereign potentate, governing the universe 
under a system of iron law, the legislator of nature and 
the taskmaster of the soul, the rewarder of them that 
obey and the punisher of them that disobey, is plainly an 
idea borrowed from politics, the form of the idea most 
convenient to those who need God as an ally in the 
maintenance of law and order as they conceive them. 
. . . It is extremely difficult to find any form of the 
idea of God which has retained a purely spiritual or 
religious character throughout the entire course of its 
history.’ A notorious illustration of the vicious at- 
tempt to pull God into an evil alliance with scheming 
man is the well known “Forward with God,” a phrase 
still inscribed on the pew at Potsdam. Thus through 
the ages has human sentiment and honest desire for a 
satisfying fellowship with God been exploited in wicked 
ways. 

“God is a spirit.” But it becomes all but impossible 
to have any adequate sense of spiritual reality when 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


we are offered, either by the politician, the philosopher 
or the theologian, a God stripped of all spirituality and 
indeed of ordinary human morality. It is this attempt 
undoubtedly that induced the crude outburst of Carl 
Sandburg, “A dough-faced God with golden earrings.” 
It is a positive sign of progress when people refuse to 
profess satisfaction with such a God. 

It seems clearly necessary that the first step toward 
any adequate sense of God’s reality must be to appreci- 
ate the necessity of a spiritual perception of God. This 
is the task of the modern man of theology. 


II] 


This brings us face to face with the second main dif- 
ficulty. The inspired writer appreciated this difficulty 
when he said quite frankly, “No man hath seen God at 
any time.” Generally speaking we gain our perception 
of personality through the senses. We are so in the 
habit of confusing reality with sense-impression that 
the moment we are denied the privilege of grasping 
anything with our senses we fail to grasp it at all. 
“Out of sight, out of mind,” is a fault not only with 
lovers but with believers as well. 

It has been suggested, however, that even in ordi- 
nary human intercourse the physical aspect is rather an 
accompaniment of that relationship than its essence. 
Any two persons who know each other at all know each 
other not because they are physically present to each | 
other but because their intimacy comes rather through 


[110] 


FINDING GOD UNREAL 


a very genuine spiritual perception. It is the inward 
eye that sees most clearly. The data of the senses are 
subject constantly to the critical review of our inward 
perception. We have all had the experience of making 
up our minds about a certain acquaintance on the basis 
of our sense-impression of that one only to discover in 
a moment of unique intimacy that our judgment was 
wrong; only to confess “I never knew him until now.” 
It is perhaps this that Jesus had in mind when he said 
that all those who say “Lord, Lord” would not enter 
into the kingdom; that in the great day He would say 
quite curtly to them “Depart from Me, I never knew 
you.” He knew them physically and they knew Him 
but there was not that inner perception which is real 
knowledge. 

We ask ourselves, therefore, in the light of the unim- 
portance of the physical aspect whether there are not in 
our own lives inner lights that furnish a basis for a 
quite certain and definite knowledge of a very real God. 
What of those promptings to great living that we all 
have and either follow or smother? What of this 
clear call to definite sacrifice of our material interests 
for the sake of a timely moral cause? What of this 
ever present sense of a disciplining presence which, if 
we are frivolous and sinful, we resent and shun, or, 
if we are sincere and earnest, we prize as life’s richest 
blessing? They point, to my mind, to a very certain 
and undeniable reality. 

The boy, Samuel, heard a voice in the night. The 
voice of God he thought it was. His whole life was 
fashioned by the leading of that voice. The Maid of 


Pitt] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Orleans heard voices from the sky. Her whole career 
is the result of hearing those voices. And even the con- 
firmed denier of any such thing as a being called God 
has his moments of crushing doubt, for Browning is 
eternally right in his analysis of dogmatic scepticism: 


“Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death, 
A chorus ending from Euripides.” 


IV 


Again, when we speak of God we are always com- 
pelled to use symbol. The history of religious thought 
from the first pages of the Bible to the last outburst 
of Louis Untermyer portrays the greatest variety of 
symbolic description of the Divine Being. Either it is 
the Old Testament figure of the “Lord of Hosts” or the 
prophetic characterization of God as a forgiving hus- 
band, or the more tender term, Mother, which is used 
at least once of God, or finally the more abiding sug- 
gestion of Jesus that God is a loving Father. The in- 
capacity to fitly frame thought as well as the inadequacy 
of human experience to escape its own limitations 
makes symbol necessary in our thought of God. To 
express a spiritual fact in language that is adapted to 
the setting forth of physical facts imposes a strict 
limitation upon us. 

This necessity of itself creates a difficulty. Whereas 
on the one hand the symbol adopted by Jesus has enabled’ 
countless honest souls to find God and hold Him real it 
has also troubled more than one of us by the very 


fr12] 


FINDING GOD UNREAL 


limitation of the symbol. Samuel Butler, for instance, 
if he were asked to think of God as Father could only 
think of Him in the most ungenerous and disturbing 
manner. His experience of fatherliness was not very 
satisfying. He wrote the following note on the rela- 
tion sustained toward his father: ‘‘He never liked me, 
nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to 
mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him; 
over and over again J have relented towards him and 
said to myself that he was a good fellow after all; but 
I had hardly done so when he would go for me in 
some way or other which soured me again. I have no 
doubt I have made myself disagreeable; certainly I 
have done many very silly and wrong things; I am not 
at all sure that the fault is more his than mine. But 
no matter whose it is, the fact remains that for years 
and years J have never passed a day without thinking 
of him many times over as the man who was sure to be 
against me, and who would see the bad side rather than 
the good of everything I said and did.”’ 

And yet to symbol we are enslaved. Its practical aid 
to point us to reality is undeniable. As has been so 
shrewdly remarked, when your friend tries to point out 
to you a constellation in the heavens and you fail to 
find it, he aids you in your search by making rough 
dots on a piece of paper, the dots standing in relative 
position one to the other as do the stars in the con- 
stellation. You glance at the dots on the paper and 
immediately you find the constellation in the heavens. 
The dots and the paper are not the constellation, they 
are not the reality, but they do assist greatly in finding 


[113] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


the constellation, in acquiring an intelligent notion of 
the reality. So that whereas symbol can never take the 
place of reality it can conduct us to reality. A tyran- 
nous and sometimes unscrupulous orthodoxy has exer- 
cised great cruelty over the troubled souls of men and 
women by insisting on the acceptance of a symbolic 
aspect of God which no longer comports with contem- 
porary experience. How much of the rebellion against 
religion among honest and sincere people is due to the 
crude and barbaric notions of God that they are asked 
to accept remains yet to be computed. 

Symbols at best are fragile and helpless things. 
They are at all times inadequate to express fully the 
meaning and nature of the thing symbolized. The 
symbols that we use when we seek to define the mean- 
ing and nature of God are as much a confession of ig- 
norance as an expression of insight. ‘But the confes- 
sion of our ignorance once made,” as Martineau so well 
says, ‘““we may proceed to use such poor thought and 
and language as we find least unsuitable to so high a 
matter; for it is the essence and beginning of religion 
to feel that all our belief and speech respecting God is 
untrue, yet infinitely truer than any non-belief and 
silence.” 


Vv 


The paramount reason why God seems so unreal re-. 
mains to be acknowledged. “Your sins have separated 
between you and your God,” was the avowed convic- 
tion of the prophet. Not that the gross sins of the flesh 


[114] 


FINDING GOD UNREAL 


chiefly accomplish this disastrous result. Publicans and 
sinners go into the Kingdom of God before many of 
those who are refined and cultivated. How often has it 
been known that vile and foul persons when the great 
moment of awakening came achieved a devotion that 
was equally notable for its fervor and completeness? 
Augustine is a brilliant example, so is Tolstoy. 

There are sins of neglect that are frequently more 
destructive of the sense of God’s reality than the more 
revolting carnal sins. This suggestion has been bril- 
liantly pursued by President King in his helpful book, 
“The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life.” “Here 
is a man perhaps into whose life for years no conscious 
relation of God and the spiritual life has come; who has 
acted precisely as if they were not; who has virtually 
denied their existence in every act; whose thoughts, 
plans, purposes have been all apart from God; who has 
settled habits of thought and life, that are logically con- 
sistent only with the denial of God and the spiritual 
life. Will those habits have no influence on his spiritual 
insight? Is he to come now at one bound into the clear 
and simple vision of God and divine truth which may 
have belonged to his childhood? And shall he refuse 
to have patience to take the toilsome way back to those 
early convictions from which his lack of earnestness, 
his carelessness, his indifference, his neglect, his world- 
liness and his sin have separated him? Verily, I some- 
times think it were a strange thing if the spiritual life 
were not obscure to many of us. If the voice within 
us were not indeed divine long since would it have been 
smothered under the heaped up rubbish of the years.” 


[115] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


The rubbish of the years is so piled up on the pure in- 
tentions, the holy motives, the sanctified ambitions of 
the nobler beginning of life that one wonders some- 
times whether that beginning can be found again. It 
is those sins that are most far-reaching in their con- 
sequences to our life of fellowship. It is pathetic but 
true that if one has once had the passion to be zealously 
Christian and has set it aside that it will not easily 
return. There is a spiritual discipline that is not unlike 
any other discipline. It exacts the toll of practice for 
the possession of the prize of certainty. 


VI 


Come now to Jesus’ answer to Philip, “He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father.” Study the portrait of 
the historical Christ. Give your verdict as you would 
on any person whose life you can study. See the human 
fade out and the lineaments of the Divine shine through. 
This is the significance finally of Papini’s brilliant book, 
“The Life of Christ.” What thought and literary in- 
sight could not bring, a study of Christ’s life brought 
gloriously. Not by brooding nor yet by argument will 
one come upon the reality of God. “You rarely find 
dew after a windy night,” said Tennyson to his son; so 
will you rarely find God after a stormy argument. But 
study Christ and your conclusion will suffice and the 
seeming unreality of God will vanish. Let no one 
undertake the denial of God who has not lingered over 
the portrait of Christ, the living Christ in the Gospels. 

[116] 


FINDING GOD UNREAL 


He is guilty of perilous rashness who after ever so 
honest a period of philosophic meditation concludes that 
tokens of the reality of God are manifestly absent. It 
is such rashness that characterizes so much of our hasty 
literature of doubt. Audacious, even swift, in its at- 
tack on the religious problem, one yet feels that it has 
left the main problem untouched; it has missed the chief 
fact in the data of life. That fact is Jesus Christ. 
Gently, wistfully he warns us, “No man cometh unto 
the Father but by me.” ‘Ten thousand times ten 
thousand rise to testify that by Him they have come to 
the Father. They, too, are an item in the facts of life. 
To them has He shown the Father and it sufficed. 

The New Testament is quite specific on this point. 
It shows little concern for metaphysical abstraction. 
Jesus is God in the flesh. He is as much of God as the 
human understanding can grasp. He is God made 
available for human comprehension and experience, as 
has been suggested. Just as there are light rays too 
strong for the eye of man to see but easily caught and 
made available on the photographic plate so the fact 
of God in Christ becomes a fact of experience. “He 
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father”; or as Augus- 
tine puts it, ““The word was made flesh that Thy wis- 
dom might provide milk for our infant state,” 


[117] 


IX 
JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION 


St. Matthew 11:4 “Goand tell John the things which ye 
hear and see.” 


ine began his public career by attaching himself to 
the circle of John the Baptist. He was launched on 
an independent ministry under the auspices of John the 
Baptist, for it was at his behest that certain of his own 
disciples joined’ the Master. Moreover, when Jesus 
came into Galilee bringing the Gospel to the people He 
used some of the very phrases of John. “Repent ye, 
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” was certainly a 
direct borrowing. To take a more striking illustration, 
when Jesus sought in his vocabulary for a pointed word 
to pierce the thick skin of Pharisaism he chose the ef- 
fective “ye offspring of vipers” of John—a word found 
in no other place in the New Testament. 

The high esteem in which Jesus held John is unques- 
tioned; he is the greatest of the Prophets. He is in 
sharp contrast with the priests and religious leaders 
of the day. They fawn and scrape the floor before 
kings and governors; he calls sharply to account the 
licentious ruler of Galilee. They frequent palaces and 
_ regale themselves in luxury; he adopts the dress and 
habit of the ascetic and flees in revolt from the degen- 

[118] 


JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION 


erate ways of the times. They make a display of their 
piety, seeking the face of men; he shuns the face of man 
the better to behold the face of God. “Among them 
that hath been born of woman there hath not arisen a 
greater than John the Baptist.” 

That John held Jesus in the highest reverence goes 
without saying. He committed himself decisively when 
he declared, ‘“He must increase but I must decrease.” 
The Master engaged the loyalty and confidence of John. 
It was given without stint or reservation. So much is 
evident. What then shall we make of this deputation 
sent by him to Jesus with the almost brutally frank 
question, “Art thou He that should come or look we 
for another?’ The deputation reached Jesus at the 
end of his tour in Galilee. Definite reports had prob- 
ably reached John in his prison cell on the Dead Sea 
concerning the Master’s work. It is on the basis of 
these reports that he so flatly challenged him. 

Jealousy has been suggested as a motive prompting 
the action. “A Christian,” according to Edwin Booth, 
“is one who rejoices in the superiority of a rival.” Je- 
sus was no rival of John but rather a successor to him. 
One need not insist on that interpretation. If one may 
say so, the question of John is an honest challenge to the 
Christ to exhibit good reasons why anyone should be- 
lieve in the validity of his regeneration. Let Jesus apply 
reasonable tests to the movement He is leading. Jesus 
accepts the challenge, censuring John not at all for, said 
He, ‘‘Blessed is he who findeth no occasion to stumble 
in Me.” Even John, noble soul that he is, has stumbled. 


[119] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Glorious as it would have been to have had him believe 
implicitly, it is not immoral to have him doubt. 

In meeting the challenge Jesus made this terse reply, 
“Go and tell John the things which ye hear and see: 
the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the 
lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are 
raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached to 
them.” 

Strictly speaking John’s question is symbolic of the 
challenge that the old order always flings to the new. 
For that reason the tests that Jesus applies to his re- 
ligion, become valuable to religious people at any time. 


I 


Jesus appealed to the present, not the past, and His 
concern about the present is always with a tremendous 
reference to the future. The Master was never willing 
to trade on the credulity of people. There was much in 
the past that He might have appealed to for vindication, 
He might have appealed to the prophetic utterances con- 
cerning himself. Great numbers of people would have 
given credence to such an appeal. Could He not have 
reminded John of His baptism and what happened on 
that singular occasion? He might even have made John 
“eat his own words,” for had not the Baptist expressed 
himself very forcibly concerning the Master? Perhaps 
there is someone who would suggest that He might 
have appealed to the virgin birth. Jesus never once 
refers to it. The Master insisted that the validity of 
His religion will be established by its contemporary 


[120] 


JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION 


effect. ‘Go and tell John the things which ye hear and 
see’ now. 

Christianity must vindicate itself anew in each gen- 
eration. There is much in the past of modern Chris- 
tianity that is glorious and attractive. The temptation 
to appeal to it for the vindication of the present is 
severe. We dare not yield to it. 

The Christianity which we have inherited can point 
to a long list of brilliant achievements. In the city of 
Paris there stands a majestic old building symbolic of 
the achievement of Christianity. It is the first hospital 
erected in Europe. One goes to Rome and beholds the 
glorious ruins of the Coliseum, the scene of so many a 
ghastly combat between man and wild beast. It was 
the power of Christianity working in the life of an aged 
monk that stopped the brutality and rendered the Coli- 
seum a ruin. Christianity can lay claim to the making 
of the modern gentleman, for the Crusades made him 
and Christianity made the Crusades. There is the 
movement of the Reformation which gave us the mod- 
ern world with its freedom and its changed viewpoint. 
Or what of the Puritan Movement, a fresh outburst of 
aggressive Christianity, which gave us not only the 
Anglo-Saxon home, the foundation of our social order, 
but also modern scientific inquiry. And what an 
achievement we see in Plymouth and American democ- 
racy. The historian concedes that it was not until the 
ideals of democracy obtained the power of religious 
conviction that they got themselves expressed in a social 
order. The past of Christianity is noble. Perhaps for 
that very reason we dare not appeal to it. 


hits 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Jesus’ tests for a valid Christianity must be taken seri- 
ously. We want a Christianity that has not only a 
majestic past but also a winsome present; one that can 
evoke not only reverence but also enthusiasm. If we 
persist in feeding on the past we need to be reminded, 
in Hugo’s phrase, that “to feed on the past is to bite 
the dust.’ That Christianity was potent in the six- 
teenth century means nothing to the twentieth century. 
Let it be powerful now if it can. Much of the social 
mischief of the present is caused by the foolish habit of 
trying to force fixed ideas that have a past on growing 
minds that crave a future. An idea to be successful 
must not only be true but timely. Even the martyr 
wastes his life if he is dying for an idea that isn’t timely. 
With the best will in the world and the finest qualifica- 
tions of salesmanship, how many ox-carts do you think 
a man or an army of men could sell to-day? They 
might be perfectly good ox-carts but people are travel- 
ing in automobiles. For the warfare of the present 
we must go, not to the theological museum, but the 
moral arsenal. 

In his bracing book on “Compromise” John Morley 
reminds us that “of all the evil spirits abroad at this 
hour in this world insincerity is the most dangerous.” 
But what is insincerity? It is an evil mixture com- 
pounded of an almost violent belief in an outgrown 
dogma and a similarly violent refusal to permit the 
new life of the present to express itself in a teaching 
indigenous of it. ‘Nothing hinders the victory of 
Jesus Christ more fatally than the suspicion that His 
champions and advocates are opportunists ; that they are 


[122] 


JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION 


less than candid; that they practice mental reservation.” 
Raven of Cambridge insists “that the universities are 
surging with religious life,” but he goes on to warn us 
of “the haunting fear among young people that clergy 
and laity alike are insincere; that they are deliberately 
repeating words which they know to be untrue.” The 
times need nothing so much as a leader who can express 
Christianity in terms that will release the full power of 
our believing capacity. The new statement of belief 
may be more faulty, less confident than the old. So 
long as it is timely it will serve our purpose. We must 
bear in mind Ruskin’s injunction that “the life of re- 
ligion depends on the force of faith not the terms of 
it.’ Santayana’s suggestion is in order: As in the 
building of the Cathedrals of Europe successive cen- 
turies contributed their parts in differing styles while 
the pile, when complete, was a harmonious whole so will 
the Temple of Humanity be raised by the cooperative 
effort of successive generations, each working in its 
own particular way. When completed that Temple will 
be a pleasing and harmonious whole. 


If 


Jesus appealed to works and not words. The second 
test that was chosen by the Master to be applied to His 
religion was the test of fact as against opinion. Once, 
we are informed, the Master sought to get Himself vin- 
dicated by opinion. “Whom do men say that I am?” 
Apparently the method was disappointing. We learn 


[123 | 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


that later he insists, “Believe Me for the very work’s 
sake.’ The “works” that Jesus appeals to in this 
particular instance seem to be miracles. To the modern 
man the vindication of Christianity by an appeal to the 
miracles of Jesus is not very attractive. Let us not 
wince at miracle. As Dean Mathews so pointedly ob- 
serves, ‘“An exceptional man may be expected to do 
exceptional things.” If some first century individual 
should read the story of modern doings he would prob- 
ably be just as sceptical concerning what he would call 
the miracle of antiseptic surgery, for instance, naviga- 
tion under the sea, and in the air, and many of our 
other practices. It was only a very few years ago that 
Lord Northcliffe, that Lucifer among the fallen angels 
of newspaperdom, threatened to dismiss a reporter who 
had lost his senses so far as to put an item in the paper 
which seemed to indicate that the Wright brothers had 
flown in a heavier-than-air craft. 

But the element of miracle is not the dominant nor 
even the most significant fact that Jesus points to. 
John had insisted that the coming savior of society 
would accomplish its regeneration. Jesus in seeking 
vindication by an appeal to fact implies that the results 
will be convincing to John. In other words, is it not 
true that with each record of a miraculous happening 
there practically always goes the story of a changed life. 
The sober words of a noble scholar are certainly to the 
point: “Even when He appealed to the works which 
are commonly called miraculous, He appealed not so 
much to the power exhibited by the works (which He 
admitted might quite conceivably come from Satan), 


[124] 


JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION 


but to their goodness. It was the merciful character of 
His healings which showed that they came from God.” 

It is a commonplace to observe that works of mercy 
and sacrince have a strange power to convince us of the 
validity of a religion which opinions do not have. 
Men will support a religion that issues in self-sacrifice, 
good-will, benevolence and long suffering, who do not 
support the theological opinions of its priests and. 
preachers. This is not to despise theology but to face 
fact. It, too, is honorable. 

“Christianity came into the world in the simple dress 
of the prophet of righteousness. It won that world by 
the stern reality of its life, by the subtle force of 
brotherhood, by its message of consolation and of hope. 
Around it thronged the race of eloquent talkers, the 
sophists of the fourth century particularly, who per- 
suaded it to change its dress and to assimilate its lan- 
guage into their own. Christianity seemed thereby to 
win a better, completer victory. But it purchased con- 
quest at the price of reality.” Such is Hatch’s analysis 
of fourth century influence upon Christianity. It became 
a religion of rhetoric and eloquence rather than a reality 
and an experience. To this very day the dominant 
danger to Christianity is the eloquence that is put for- 
ward on its behalf. Too frequently the truths of Chris- 
tianity are truths of utterance rather than truths of life. 
Just as a class of chemists who sought to vindicate their 
science by an appeal to their rhetoric would be ridicu- 
lous, so is a class of Christians who appeal to their 
rhetoric rather than the hard facts of their experience 
becoming ridiculous. Christianity dare not resent the 


[125] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


test of fact. Its vindication lies in its appeal to fact. 
If Christianity would vindicate itself to-day it must 
establish works to which it can appeal. Those works 
must be Christianized personalities. 

Christianity answers few mental queries but satis- 
fies all moral longings; it is not to be studied so much 
as practiced; it is not to be believed so much as tried; 
its faith springs not from credulity but from experi- 
ment. Christianity leaves you free to face any theory, 
scientific, psychologic, philosophic, with an open, in- 
quiring mind. It has lived happily with several opposite 
theories, often simultaneously. Theories arrayed in 
antagonism have exhibited equal virtue in their devotees. 
What Christianity abhors is not mental inquiry but 
moral stagnation, not the confused head but the cold 
heart. The peace of the callous heart is Christianity’s 
signal for a fight, beginning within. The final answer 
of Christianity to the inveterate questions of the human 
mind is Christian people. To the question of evil Job is 
the answer, to the question of pain Stevenson. Let Liv- 
ingstone, Chalmers, and Grenfell speak, for they have 
caught the heart beat of the Christ. 


Til 


“The poor have the.Gospel preached to them.” Not 
since the prophets had any one taken the Gospel— 
good news—to the poor. And the prophets can hardly 
be said to have brought ‘“‘good news.” Here then is a 
striking phenomenon. Jesus seeks out the poor. He 
seeks them to bring them good news. 


[126] 


JESUS’ TESTS FOR A VALID RELIGION 


Religion as then known was anything but good news, 
especially to the poor. It had become support of an in- 
stitution rather than access to God. That institution 
had become ever more relentless in its requirements 
and more neglectful of the poor. Thus came about that 
great class of socially insignificant, ‘‘the lost,’”’ to whom 
Jesus came. 

To recover Jesus’ passion for the socially insignificant 
man may yet prove to be the most difficult task of 
modern Christianity. Russia in its present state may 
well be a warning to that type of religious leadership 
which fails to be touched by the deeper needs of the 
socially insignificant. What earnest, cross-bearing 
Christian does not feel a personal sting in the words 
of Shaftesbury, who in his bitter struggle for that class 
of socially insignificant had to cry out “Sinners were 
with me, saints were against me.’ Better a thousand 
fold that modern Christianity go under, as the roman- 
tic pessimists predict that it will, battling for the socially 
insignificant than that it live amid pomp and pride, to- 
tally deaf to their pleadings. 

A religion that is good news to the socially insignifi- 
cant, such is the religion of Jesus, such must any valid 
religion be. Let modern Christianity measure itself by 
that test. 

But what was the good news Jesus brought? That 
God is a Friend, a fatherly, available, helpful Presence; 
that life may be a quiet joy when lived in this friendly 
companionship; that the things to be chiefly striven for 
are simple—they are love, kindness, peace, and self- 
control ; that sin hasn’t the final say in life for 


[127] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


“Parson chaps aren’t mad supposin’ 
: 5] 2? 
A man can change the way he’s chosen; 


that even sin can’t smother the friendship of God; that 
death is not the final verdict of life. It is a message 
of hope, when wearying with the struggle, “Come unto 
me and I will rest you’’; when discouraged, ‘‘Fear not, — 
little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you 
the kingdom’”’; when agitated and passion-torn, “My 
peace I give unto you.”” Ina word Jesus furnished, as 
has been so well said, “a Divine basis for daily living.” 
Can modern Christianity do that? That is the one 
thing it is expected to do. 

It can as it renews its own conviction in the simple 
response of Jesus to His friend John; if it is willing to 
accept these tests and establish its validity on this basis. 
Let it judge itself by these tests of Jesus lest God bring 
a worse judgment upon it. 

Judgment must begin at the House of God. There 
is something depressing about the current eagerness to 
absolve the church of all blame for our modern social 
misery. There is cause for alarm among the followers 
of Christ in the fact that the church is counting so 
little in the attempted solutions of our problems. We 
do not want another Canossa where the rulers of men 
repent before the heads of the church. But it would be 
a sign of great hope if we could all stand before our 
God in penitence and tears for our social indifference 
and moral impotence. When we do so stand we may 
be certain of a new outburst of spiritual fervor and a 
fresh out-pouring of His Spirit. 


[128] 


xX 
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


St. John 10:10 “J came that they may have life and may 
have it abundantly,” 


I Corinthians 6:20 “Glorify God therefore in your 
body.” 


Feria had a great deal to say about sex. He dealt 

mercilessly, though constructively, with the con- 
ventional standard of sex conduct as He did with the 
current standard in other areas of social living. He 
met the sophistries of the day with genuine ethical in- 
sight. “He that looketh on a woman to lust after her 
hath already committed adultery with her.” Repeatedly 
He cast His sheltering sympathy about the social out- 
cast, especially the woman. Plainly He thought He had 
a helpful message to those who found themselves in 
moral distress. 

A like boldness has not characterized the Church of 
Christ in dealing with sex morality. An almost uni- 
versal conspiracy of silence has kept the subject out of 
the mouth of the religious leader and teacher. It is not 
to be discussed from the sacred desk. The subject is 
taboo. But if the church persists in this attitude it 
might as well admit forthwith that the really vital 
themes of life are out of its province. 

“The evils that come through the mismanagement of 


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sex relations have beaten every civilization up to the 
present.” This very arresting statement by a British 
clergyman who has written ably and with authority on 
sex morality raises the stubborn question “Will they 
beat ours?’ They will unless we display greater ability 
in the management of private morals than we have 
hitherto. The situation is alarming. The divorce rate 
in the United States is now one to every seven mar- 
riages. That exceeds the record of any other country. 
Our social life is red with moral anarchy; our current 
literature wallows in mire. Chastity is held lightly. 
Nor can we dismiss the whole matter with the flippant 
remark that a lot of indecent people are expressing 
themselves. Unless a guiding voice takes up the cause 
of sexual right-living our social life will be given over 
entirely to such leadership as our naturalistic fiction 
offers. Only recently so responsible a journal as the 
New Republic has lent its pages to a frontal attack on 
the time-tested Christian standard of sex morality. 
The writer of the article advocates, or at least sanctions, 
irregular sex relations, trial marriage and experimenta- 
tion. Continency and self-control are held unnatural. 
Financial mastery of the woman’s body is the only evil 
recognized by him. Professor Stuart Sherman sees 
developing among us “an esthetic philosophy which 
rejects the moral valuations of life.” One may fairly 
ask, are these tokens of a rising tide of evil which, when 
at its flood, will take down with it the institutions of 
our social life? May it not be necessary for some 
“sloomy dean” to rise up among us and cry out “I 
come to bury America and not to praise her” ? 


[130] 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


True, much of the literature seeks justification for its 
attack on the Christian standard of sex morality in the 
fact that the conventions of society are manifestly un- 
fair. Our modern literature gives to the woman an 
unquestioned right to choose her own sex career; it 
exalts this right over against the narrow and stupid dic- 
tates of society. It is thus a protest against social con- 
ventions that have too long dominated the field of sex 
morality, for they are and have been inherently unjust. 
Too long have our conventions wickedly assumed that 
the whole burden of clean living rests on the woman; 
too long have we punished the woman only for sex 
irregularity. That the modern thinking person rebels 
against this attitude is not to be deplored but to be 
praised. Let it be understood, however, that there 
never was a distinction between men and women in the 
Christian standard of morality. The unjust social con- 
ventions cannot claim the standard that I am pleading 
for as a basis. To treat unchastity among men as a 
light offense, while it merits condign punishment, even 
social ostracism, among women, is not the spirit of 
Christian morality, nor its letter. No Christian has any 
sympathy with a standard of sex life which permits a 
man to ask of a woman that which, if she gives it, will 
outlaw her from respectable society. That the double 
standard is going is all to the good but the sober truth 
remains that the modern protests against the wicked 
double standard have at the same time developed a defi- 
nite trend toward a more wicked single standard, the 
man’s standard. This alleged freedom that current 
literature and modern practice claim to bring is freedom 


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7 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


for the woman to be as wicked as the man, with safety. 
Society is asked to condemn its manifestly unfair con- 
ventions only to give sanction to a convention, which 
if it be more fair, is also more corrupting. Society 
yields at its own peril. 

Clearly put then, what is the problem of modern sex 
morality? What are the data of discord upon which 
one must think to think clearly through to an adequate 
standard that may be practiced with safety and that 
offers a measure of social salvation to us? Must the 
Christian standard of sex morality be superseded ? 


I 


The fashion in Christian piety has always been to re- 
gard the fact of sex as indecent and to treat the sex in- 
stinct as an evidence of our common degeneracy. The 
very words, designating the various elements of the sex 
life, were dark secrets to be kept from young ears. 
How often have boys and girls of early adolescence 
made furtive raids on the dictionary to make out the 
dark meaning of some accidentally discovered word re- 
lated to the sex life. Ignorance has been synonymous 
with innocence, knowledge with guilt. Especially must 
the young girl come to her wedding day with a mind 
immaculately empty of anything like adequate informa- 
tion about the most serious task of her life, consumma- 
tion of love in Christian family life. Such has been 
the attitude of Christian piety, so-called. That atti- 
tude is full of guilt, pregnant with mischief, definitely 


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CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


unfair to the young people about to enter a full and 
complete experience of life. 

The sex instinct is a fact of life. To ignore it is 
dangerous, as it will not be ignored. It has strange 
power to demand recognition. Sex desire will knock at 
the door of life, sooner or later, beckoning the privilege 
of entrance upon experience. To call it “bad” or 
“wicked” is to hopelessly confuse God’s order of crea- 
tion. The truth is that sex desire is natural and proper. 
It can be made beautiful and useful. At any rate it isa 
fact of life. The most obvious thing to do about it is 
to understand it. It is at this point that Maude Royden 
is flaying so powerfully the quack Christians who are 
trying to besmirch sex feeling as wrong and sinful. 
There is nothing wrong and sinful about it and it need 
not become dangerous if one is taught its nature and the 
proper use of it. 

The horror of evasion was brought home to me some 
years ago when a quite young girl of excellent charac- 
ter brought the broken fragments of her life, pleading 
pathetically that I help put them together again, if such 
a thing be possible. She was not vicious, she was not 
depraved. Her cry was “I did not understand. No 
one ever told me.” And if I am speaking to some young 
man or woman to-night who does not understand and 
does not know let me ask you very earnestly to find 
out from the proper person, your father and mother, 
at once. To know is to take the first step in self-control 
and self-management of your sex life. If you fail in 
that, any other success you may achieve can bring you 
little permanent satisfaction. The strategy of fate, the 


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proper mastery of your own future, begins right there. 
Don’t trifle. 


II 


To the Christian there is and always has been only 
one standard of sex morality. It is a single standard, 
the same for men and women the world over. It 
makes no concession to human weakness for the fellow- 
ship of Christ supplies strength at every point in life’s _ 
tempted way, at this point perhaps more than at any 
other. In the fight for character the Christian re- 
peatedly cries out, “I can do all things through Christ 
who strengtheneth me.” The Christian standard is 
quite specific on this point. It says unmistakably that 
chastity before marriage and fidelity and self-control 
after marriage are the only mark of manhood and 
womanhood redeemed by Christ. It makes the same 
demand of rich and poor, male and female, the world 
over. True, men there have been, and women too, high 
in the affairs of the church who have in their conduct 
flaunted this standard. The very execration the regen- 
erate conscience visits upon their memories vindicates 
the standard. Not that failure need be the final verdict 
on the fallen. Forgiveness is also a fact of Christianity 
and a glorious fact. But forgiveness for failure follows 
penitence and penitence exalts the standard from which 
one has fallen. 

Alongside the Christian standard, however, is an- 
other standard of sex morality, the conventional stand- 
ard. It is frankly partial to the man. It holds no high 


[134] 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


and inspiring goal of integrity before the young man. 
It puts the whole responsibility for sex integrity upon 
the woman. It tags the woman who yields with a 
damning name while it has only a cynical smile for 
the man. It rests on the assumption that human na- 
ture is base and depraved and that utter integrity is a 
dream. The conventional standard of sex morality is 
the most unchristian item in our whole scheme of mod- 
ern life. It is a cowardly compromise with evil, it 
holds a dishonoring and pessimistic view of human 
nature, it is contemptible in its attitude toward woman. 
Respectability and not honor is its watchword. To this 
scale we are paring down our moral conduct. 

This has developed a deep-seated modern supersti- 
tion that the Christian standard of sex morality is 
against human nature; that its exalted attitude is only 
a pose; that hope of attainment is spurious. Let us 
turn to this superstition for a moment and examine it. 


Ill 


Moral law is never against human nature but in ful- 
fillment of it. It issues from the heart of life and ex- 
perience. Stealing is wrong not because God thun- 
dered from Sinai ‘Thou shalt not steal’ but because 
orderly social life could not go on if property were 
not protected. Experience validates the decalogue. So 
with murder and slander. And so with sex immorality. 
There is as much justification in human nature for 
murder, theft and evil communications as there is for 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


loose sex life. Which is to say there is none. The 
self-preservation of human nature requires these moral 
mandates against the forces of disintegration. They 
are the forces that resist destruction. These moral 
laws are life. An acute critic has recently remarked on 
the note of sexual disgust which characterizes our mod- 
ern realistic fiction. “The stench of a disintegrated 
personality” fumes in the books of the moderns like 
a “last irreducible hell.”” The ultimate outcome of this 
so-called freedom from moral restraint is disgust. 
What greater testimony to the need for a moral law 
which grows out of life can we have? 

But, you ask, does not my sex instinct demand a sex 
experience which the Christian standard labels 
“wrong”? Let us see. What is human nature? It ts 
a threefold affair, made up of body, mind, and spirit. 
For its fulfillment no one of these may make demands 
the satisfaction of which will violate the demands of 
either one of the other two. If it does it is against 
human nature. The ascetic who fled to his hut on the 
mountain to dwell in solitary confinement was wrong 
because he outraged the body in the interests of the 
spirit. Likewise is the libertine wrong who, to give 
his body the experience its instincts crave, violates the 
the spirit and outrages the mind. A sex experience 
contrary to the Christian standard of morality is 
against human nature therefore because it sacrifices the 
natural rights of mind and soul to the craving of the 
body. Any bodily satisfaction that robs you of peace 
of mind and integrity of spirit is distinctly against hu- 
man nature. This the Christian standard is set to pre- 


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CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


vent. This an unchristian sex experience does. Testi- 
mony on that point is abundant. 

Moreover, it now seems certain that monogamy is 
a practice antedating by many centuries the advent of 
Christianity. Biologists are suggesting that it was a 
regular practice among primitive peoples; some scien- 
tists insist that pre-human orders of life are given to 
it. Strange testimony indeed to the naturalness of the 
Christian standard of sex morality. One must never 
forget further that the Eden of a legitimate sex ex- 
perience stands guarded by the flaming sword of dis- 
ease which so inevitably overtakes him who practices 
promiscuity. 


IV 


If therefore, the Christian standard’ is not against 
human nature how can one be enabled to practice it; 
by what process can sex morality become happily Chris- 
tian, in the light of normal human experience? Such 
questions are fair and deserve a frank and honest 
answer. It is to be observed immediately that sex life 
will never be elevated unless we are prepared to under- 
take an approach to it on a basis higher than merely 
sex hygiene. Bodily excellence, after all, is not pri- 
marily the aim of Christian morality. It is that full- 
ness of life that Jesus came to give that constitutes 
his moral ideal; wherefore it is quite necessary to 
understand that any lesser standard is condemned not 
chiefly because it is wrong but because it prevents that 
rightful fullness of experience which human nature in 
its threefold aspect demands. It is with this in mind 


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that I want to make three suggestions in response to 
the question at the head of this paragraph. 

First, any unwilling repression of the sex instinct, 
as indeed of any fundamental instinct, courts disaster. 
So much the psychologists are certain of. Merely to 
display will-power and self-control arbitrarily, though 
it may carry one over the road roughened by specific 
temptation, will hardly bring that satisfaction to life 
which a willing and enthusiastic practice of purity cer- 
tainly brings. To achieve that wholesomeness of life 
which the sex instinct threatens to spoil one needs to 
be resolved quite willingly and with a measure of en- 
thusiasm not only not to have an unchristian sex ex- 
perience but to. compel the very energy of life to find 
other channels for its fulfillment. What I am saying 
is that we must fall back on the well-established prin- 
ciple of the new psychology, the sublimation of the life 
force. 

Stripped of the rather menacing technicalities in 
which it expresses itself the new psychology says quite 
plainly that this cosmic energy, this dynamic force, this 
urge, this drive within which it calls the libido, seeks 
to express itself through our instincts; psychology also 
says that it is perfectly possible to divert this urge from 
one channel to another. This process of diversion is 
called sublimation. Wherefore one is quite correct in 
suggesting that one can direct the outlet of his energies 
according to the authoritative standard of moral values 
that Christianity confers upon us. In doing so he in 
no sense outrages his nature. Indeed he gives himself 
the chance for a richer, more complete, more satisfac- 


[138] 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


tory experience of life. Julian Huxley, writing from 
the standpoint of the biologist, has pointed out re- 
cently that in man the constant trend of development is 
to subordinate the physiological side to the psycho- 
logical. In animals the reverse is true. ‘One of the 
most important biological generalizations is that pro- 
gressive evolution is accompanied by the rise of one 
part to dominance and, whenever there are many parts 
to be considered, by the arrangement of the rest in 
some form of hierarchy, each part being subordinate 
to one above, dominant to one below. It is such a 
hierarchy which we must try to construct in our mental 
organization.” There are values, ideals and goals 
which are ultimate to the life of man. They represent 
the maximum of attainment, fullness of life. Truth, 
honesty, mental satisfaction, righteousness, freedom 
from a sense of guilt, serviceableness are such values. 
The good life seeks the fulfillment of these above all 
things else. It is a positive fact of science that the 
energy of the sex instinct can be transformed, much 
as physical energy is transformed, so as to stimulate 
the higher parts of the mind, to give reality to these 
values. In other words, a willed self-control of the 
sex instinct issues in renewed activity in the realm of 
art, music, religion, social service, or one’s own work. 
Lack of such self-control marks the breakdown of that 
mental hierarchy which is essential to satisfactory liv- 
ing. That there will be difficulty cannot be denied. 
There will always be adolescent problems. But the 
Christian standard of sex morality is not against hu- 
man nature. 


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Second, the great emotions follow the persistent 
loyalties. The power of an instinct over us is its 
capacity to give us a thrill. We live joyously when we 
live instinctively. There is a strange, if transient, 
ecstasy that accompanies our instinctive acts. War 
thrills; it ministers to the instinct of pugnacity. Gain 
thrills; it ministers to the acquisitive instinct. Lust 
thrills; it ministers to the sex instinct. But the thrill 
is always transient, it does not last. The ecstasy is mo- 
mentary. It is followed invariably by bitter seasons 
of depression and disillusionment. The happy man is 
he who finds a source of permanent ecstasy, a basis of 
life that can give him a continuous thrill. 

The great and permanent emotions of satisfaction 
follow our persistent loyalties. The nine sentences of 
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount furnish the only 
basis for permanent happiness man knows. They are 
the catalogue of values of the master of the happy life. 
Loyalty to them is the only guarantee of permanent 
joy though the traitor may gain a momentary satisfac- 
tion. The end is disillusionment and vexation of spirit. 
Many are the laments of the world-weary who were 
not loyal. Listen to one of them. “To-morrow is my 
birthday—that is to say at twelve o'clock, midnight; 
i.e. in twelve minutes I shall have completed thirty 
and three years of age ! ! !-and I go to my bed with 
a heaviness of heart at having lived so long, and to so 
little purpose.” (Quoted from the diary of Byron.) 
Among those nine sentences of Jesus is one “Blessed 
are the pure in heart.” Its meaning is plain. Stead- 
fast diligence in the keeping of the heart whence are 


[140] 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


the issues of life is the only certain road to final joy. 

Third, it is the privilege of a Christian minister 
to say quite certainly that the religion of Jesus offers 
rare help in the fight for character. The help that it 
offers is manifold. In the person of Jesus it holds 
up before us a character spotless within and without 
yet “tempted in all points like as we are.” Since his 
time there have been thousands upon thousands, too 
numerous for man to count, who have found in the 
matchless companionship of this spotless one a sus- 
taining force in the day of battle. They too rise up 
before us to testify that it can be done. He who fails 
in this matter of sex morality has failed where many 
others have succeeded. He need not have failed. To 
accept the mastery of Jesus over his life is the first 
step to help him succeed. 

The redemption of the erring and the weak is a car- 
dinal fact of Christian experience. That Christ will 
keep us from falling is also a fact and just as impor- 
tant. We have been too content to neglect Christ un- 
til we begin to slip. Or, to vary the figure, we have 
been content to use our religion chiefly as a medicine 
whereas it is primarily a food. He who feeds on 
Christian ideals and Christian emotions, he who dis- 
ciplines himself in the practice of Christian habits day 
by day puts himself far from the need of religious 
medicine. 

There is essentially nothing magical or even very 
mysterious about the aids of religion to clean living. 
One chooses in his better moments to practice the 
standard of Christian morality. Every thought, every 


[141] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


fellowship, every enterprise is established with that 
end in view. Persistent loyalty gradually wins over 
the emotional self. Satisfaction and ecstasy follow. 
Temptation has less and less power over us. One finds 
himself finally as free to do the right and the good as 
one longs to be. Determined loyalty to Jesus and His 
professed and implied standard of sex morality is per- 
haps the only approach to an ultimately adequate and 
permanently satisfactory moral career. 


[142] 


XI 
A NEW APOSTOLATE 


Joshua 3:5 “Sanctify yourselves for to-morrow Jehovah 
will do wonders among you.” 


abe say that we live in a period of disillusionment 
is a truism. Like all truisms it does pay tribute 
to the prevalence of that feeling. The prevailing senti- 
ment certainly is that we have been cheated out of some- 
thing we were promised. Had we not sacrificed for it, 
bled and died that it might come to pass? For our 
blood and tears are offered only ugly reality, cold ashes 
of discontent for living enthusiasms. The present 
savors of fraud and mockery—“fraud upon the dead 
anda mockery of the wooden crosses.” 

The disillusionment set in early. Scarcely had the 
burning phrases of Woodrow Wilson cooled down, 
phrases that struck hope in the hearts of countless 
millions that had given up hope, phrases that by their 
very saneness and force seemed to make a new world 
real, just around the corner, when Sir William Orpen 
painted his much discussed picture of the men who 
won the war. Sir William was commissioned by the 
British government as the official artist at the Ver- 
sailles Conference. He had been at work for eight 
months on his canvas, painting the figures of Wilson, 


[143] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Foch, and the rest. In 
a moment of inspiration he brushed those figures out 
and painted the picture that one now sees in the Royal 
Gallery. There is the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. 
In the center stands a solitary cofin. Two men in khaki 
stand at attention, one at either side; their helmets are 
tilted at a rakish angle, their puttees undone; in their 
hands they hold their muskets as though they were 
banjos. The soldiers are dead and on their ghastly 
faces is the suggestion of a bitter and ironic smile. The 
men who won the war! 

The bitterness of our anguish stands revealed when 
one recounts the prevailing prophecies of our day. 
They stand out like menacing icebergs in a foggy sea. 
Santayana, whose conclusions we resent while we brood 
gloomily over his suspected insight, seems certain that 
“civilization is perhaps approaching one of those 
long winters that overtake it from time to time. A 
flood of barbarism from below may soon level all the 
fair work of our Christian ancestors, as another flood 
two thousand years ago leveled those of the ancients. 
Romantic Christendom, picturesque, passionate, un- 
happy episode—may be coming to an end.”’ And thus 
the era is to be ended; our hope is to be utterly burnt 
to ashes. 

The Christian heart throws back a dogged denial. 
It finds no comfort in the dismal dogmas of ‘‘defeat- 
ism’’ though it confesses its perplexity. These well- 
worn prophecies of doom seem like slaps to a crying 
child, cruel blows intended to quiet us by terror. True, 
in the short space of a half dozen years, we have slipped 


[144] 


A NEW APOSTOLATE 


from the Mount of Transfiguration to the Slough of 
Despond. The contrast between the moral wisdom 
of Wilson and the sentiment of Santayana is depress- 
ing indeed. Nevertheless we press for a new attack 
on our problem. We took our task too lightly. We 
underestimated our problem. We were guilty of an un- 
reasoned if not an unscrupulous optimism. We 
bristled with confidence in a morrow filled with won- 
ders, forgetting that we had a part in the making of 
that morrow. The plain fact is that we were taken 
unawares; we met the morrow unprepared. We came 
upon our “moment to decide,” our crucial kour, un- 
equipped, if not unresolved. We were not sanctified 
and the morrow came void of wonders. 

“Sanctify yourselves,” cried Joshua to the eager, ex- 
pectant company that followed him. Before them 
stretched the promised land. The wilderness was a 
memory. The morrow seemed secure. Only Joshua 
remained undeceived. His task was clear. He had, 
in the phrase of Graham Wallas, to “replace impulse 
with purpose.” ‘The idealism of the wilderness had 
now to become the reality of the open country. 

I take it that we are on the verge of a promised 
land—promised by every Christian impulse that 
stirred our souls these latter days. The future is not 
lost. We have still the prospect of a morrow full of 
wonders. The ancient formula may yet prove valid. 
“Sanctify yourselves for to-morrow Jehovah will work 
wonders among you.” 

The word “sanctify” is strange to our ears. Itisa 
theological word. It has a history, as most words have. 


[145] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Throughout the Old Testament it stood for a ritual- 
istic ceremony by which one prepared oneself to face 
God. Jesus, however, gave it a new turn when in that 
great prayer he said, “For their sakes I sanctify my- 
self.” Not now, it seems, did the Master sanctify Him- 
self to face God but rather to face man. It represented 
to the Christ the personal equipment essential to an 
adequate leadership of men eager for a new order of 
life. One may suggest, though I do not press the 
point, that “educate” is probably our modern equivalent 
for the ancient “sanctify.” 

What then are the items necessary in our personal 
preparation for the fulfillment of a wonder-working 
to-morrow? Can one indicate specific factors in the 
making of the modern man or woman that may be 
expected to vouchsafe a greater to-morrow? A few 
suggestions seem obvious enough. 


I 


First is the secularization, or perhaps better the mak- 
ing universal, of the pastoral instinct. Progress has 
always come because men and women have felt a re- 
sponsibility to bring it to pass and have given their 
lives to its consummation. Paul must “see Rome”; 
Wesley takes “the whole world for his parish” ; Living- 
stone attacks “the open sore of the world.” To be- 
lieve in anonymous progress is to trust to magic. It is 
possible only to the naive in mind and heart. The des- 
tiny of civilization rests with the men and women who 


[146] 


A NEW APOSTOLATE 


have the pastoral instinct. There it has always rested. 
Humanity has followed, and follows to-day, those with 
the soul of the shepherd. 

For a hundred and fifty years the man of religion 
gave the set to our American life for in him was found 
the seat of social authority. He felt the responsibility 
of the pastoral instinct. Is not the stream of Puritan- 
ism the main force playing upon our social life hith- 
erto? Since Darwin on the one hand and the industrial 
revolution on the other he has yielded his place to the 
man of science and the man of business. Upon them 
now is the responsibility of the pastoral instinct. 
Wherefore I plead for a secularization of that instinct. 
As they are the center of social authority so must they 
become the apostles of social salvation. 

Two essays remain to be added to Carlyle’s “Heroes 
and Hero Worship.” They are “The Hero as Man of 
Science’ and “The Hero as Man of Business.” The 
former is organizing knowledge while the latter or- 
ganizes our social life. Between these is divided our 
social authority of to-day. To these the American com- 
munity looks for wisdom, guidance, certainty. The 
passion for clarity of the former combines with the 
zeal for practicality of the latter to give tone and timbre 
to our modern life. I am not disposed to deplore this 
turn in our life. I gratefully welcome the implicit 
trust in the self-vindicating power of .truth which 
science exhibits. 


“Truth justifies herself, and as she dwells 
With hope, who would not follow where she leads?” 


[147] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


I welcome just as gratefully the passion of the man 
of business for the workable, the practical. It is bred in 
the Anglo-Saxon bone, this conviction that progress 
must somehow proceed out of the past, not against 
it. Since Cromwell we are under the obligation of find- 
ing some way of realizing ends which flow naturally 
out of what has gone before. A violent break with the 
past is impossible as it is unwise. 

Luther strove valiantly, and successfully, for the 
doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers. To 
that doctrine needs to be added the universal responsi- 
bility of believers. Doing chores in the church can’t 
compose the scope of responsibility of the believer 
in our modern world. To be a faithful husband, a 
good neighbor, a credulous worshiper, and a kind, con- 
siderate father may satisfy a timid conscience, but it 
can’t possibly produce a wonder-working Christianity. 
The morrow is not safe until we gain a diffusion of 
the pastoral instinct. To hold a class of men, and 
women too, set apart from the practical concerns of life, 
responsible for the Christianization of our modern 
world is as stupid as it is unfair. 

How can this change be encompassed? Not until 
the desk and the laboratory be made the vehicles of 
God’s saving grace. The true pulpit of Christ in our 
day is not to be found in church or cathedral only. 
Your business, whatever it be, must become Christ’s 
pulpit; your life in that business His eloquence, an elo- 
quence of deed more than of word. It was from the 
boat of Peter that Jesus’ voice reached the crowd with 
its message of regeneration and love. The fishing 


[148] 


A NEW APOSTOLATE 


business of Peter and his friends became the pedestal 
upon which Jesus erected his redemptive leadership. 
Until the modern man of business and of knowledge 
furnishes a like pedestal to the same Christ our re- 
demption remains unrealized. George F. Babbitt rules 
to-day. Unpromising as it appears he must nevertheless 
be helped to an appreciation of his responsibility, 


I] 


It follows hard upon what I have just said that to 
project a wonder-working Christianity into our mod- 
ern life we need a gospel for the strong, not only for 
the weak. To the now hackneyed question “Has 
Christianity failed?” the answer is simply, “Yes.” A 
Christianity concerned chiefly with help for the weak 
has failed for it is the strong that create the mischief, 
that thwart the purposes of the Lord. The ancient 
emphasis has been found inadequate. It is in that sense 
that Christianity has failed. The day of a Christian- 
ity that is 

“An ambulance 
To bring life’s wounded and malingerers in, 
Scorned by the strong” 
is done. 

That Christ brings strength to the weak, help for 
the fallen, health to the sick, and sustenance to the poor 
is a glorious fact. Let it never be neglected or gain- 
said. Hospitals, orphanages, schools, and temples 
speak more eloquently than the tongue of man on that 
point. That, nevertheless, cannot remain the major 


[149] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


emphasis in the Gospel message for our time. The era 
of a Christianity for the weak is at an end. We want 
now a Christ who can command the strong, who can 
evoke loyalty and consecration from the powerful. 
Browning, in a few astringent lines, has pilloried the 
well kept strong who remain unmoved before the suffer- 
ing weak round about: 
“As I lie smiled on full-fed 
By unexhausted power to bless, 
I gazed below on hell’s fierce bed, 


And those its waves of flame oppress, 
Swarming in ghastly wretchedness.” 


He is prompted to no helpful conduct. He is un- 
touched by need. We cannot permit the modern man of 
commerce and of knowledge, men with “unexhausted 
power to bless,” to usurp the guilty place of the self- 
ish cleric of the middle ages. The modern message 
must be quite clear and unmistakable at this point. 
How much pulpit Christianity, “protestant clerical- 
ism” it has been called, has been like a poultice to the 
conscience of the strong, the rich, the powerful, taking 
the sting of responsibility out of it while at the same 
time it has never ceased to insist on a meticulous fidelity 
from the weak! Were I to endow rescue missions, 
with the privilege of planting them, I should certainly 
plant them in newspaper offices, and editorial rooms; 
in governmental departments, especially foreign offices ; 
in wealthy, exclusive clubs; in women’s clubs, in banks, 
and perhaps in cathedrals “‘with a dim religious light.” 
These symbolize the forces that make the morrow. To 
Christianize those forces is to fill the future with the 


[150] 


A NEW APOSTOLATE 


wonders of the cross. We need to discover again that 
Christ who as he trod the Galilean hills drew unto 
himself not only the weak but also the strong. We need 
to appreciate his Gospel anew in its fullness. It is a 
Gospel for the strong. 


IIT 


We need a deepening sense of social compunction. 
The most deplorable result of several centuries of a 
contracted individualist Gospel is the widespread feel- 
ing that one is responsible for one’s own life alone; 
that one can tread the path of rectitude with pious un- 
concern. We have kept our armor polished but never 
engaged on any crusade; did not in fact seem conscious 
that a crusade was on. Life was just an endless re- 
view of shining equipment, to no purpose. 

For a generation now a different emphasis has pre- 
vailed. More than one prophetic spirit has troubled 
us with the conviction that we are unshakably guilty for 
the social wrongs of our time; guilty, though we per- 
sonally contribute ever so little to those wrongs; guilty, 
though we suffer no direct evil from those wrongs. 
The refrain in Kipling’s “Tomlinson” has been caught 
up by ever more and more sensitive souls: 


“The sin that ye do by two and two 
Ye shall answer for one by one.” 


To-day it seems clear enough that not only personal 
wrong-doing but social inquity must be laid, a load of 
guilt, upon my soul before God. 


[151] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


It is a hard saying to insist that I must accuse myself 
of the social sin of my generation. It is exactly that 
that I am pleading for, a deepening sense of what Mrs. 
Humphry Ward has called “social compunction.” 
Turn back to the opening years of the modern em- 
phasis in the Christian life. It was said of Frederick 
Dennison Maurice that he charged himself with blame 
for the social wickedness and injustice of his time. A 
new era of social influence began for Christianity with 
that sense of social compunction. The biographer of 
General Booth tells us a gripping story of the redoubt- 
able leader in his old age. He had gone to the home of 
_his daughter for rest. His waning powers were no 
longer equal to the exacting duties of his office. Dur- 
ing the afternoon of a cold winter day he was heard to 
pace the floor, sobbing and moaning. He had promised 
to remain quiet until called for tea. When reproached 
for his disobedience he broke out, “Oh, I know, but 
I’ve been thinking of all the suffering of little chil- 
dren, the children of the great cities, and I can’t rest, 
I can’t rest.” He could do no more than “sit by and 
moan” but his sense of social compunction remained 
undiminished. 

Take the experience of our own Emerson. At thirty- 
one (1834) he was living the life of a scholar and re- 
cluse. He was, as he himself put it, “hiving knowledge 
and concentrating powers to act well hereafter.” To 
him were coming steadily the scholar’s delight, knowl- 
edge, the increasing realization of his unwordly am- 
bitions and fame. Meanwhile Garrison is abroad in 
the land; abolition sentiment is growing; men and 


[152] 


A NEW APOSTOLATE 


women are being aroused. Lovejoy goes to his lonely 
grave. Our philosopher remains unmoved. His task 
is clear. He must pursue his scholarly interest, still 
hiving knowledge for some future action. To engage 
in contemporary movements is to meddle, to miss your 
task. Then follows the defection of Webster, under 
the shade of whose spreading personality smaller souls 
were resting. Emerson’s spirit is “stabbed broad 
awake.” Hear him at fifty-one (1854), twenty years 
later, at Cooper Union in New York. He is aroused 
now. He delivers sledge hammer blows for abolition, 
and yet he can say “I have lived all my life without 
suffering any known inconvenience from American 
slavery ; I never saw it; I never heard the whip; I never 
felt the check on my free speech and action.”’ And yet 
he must act; he must take personal responsibility; he 
must accuse himself of the guilt of American slavery. 
From that time on he did not “cease from mental 
strife” till he saw a new America, a morrow full of 
wonders. 

That the strong have an opportunity for service is 
true but it is only half the truth. They have a load 
of guilt to bear as well. Folly! The very folly of 
Calvary! For is not the significance of the cross just 
that, that Jesus accused himself of the sin of his time, 
and indeed of all time? That the Master took upon his 
own life the burden of social misery and bore it? 
Bishop Temple has reminded us that when the Master 
said at the institution of the Lord’s Supper “This is my 
body, broken for you; this do in remembrance of me” 
He was asking nothing less than we break our own 


[153] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


bodies for him; that the real remembrance of Christ is 
a sacrificial guilt-bearing life. 

I was in the Ruhr a few months back. I saw in a 
single day in the city of Essen :—a hospital situated on 
the richest coal mine in the world, yet not having fuel 
enough to heat the water with which to sterilize the 
instruments ; for two weeks not a single operation had 
been performed while fellow humans suffered and died 
in unnatural agony; I saw an orphanage conducted by 
a Swedish woman of noble birth where twelve hundred 
palsied, decrepit old men and women and stunted, 
tubercular, little children were fed daily one bowl of 
thin soup. There was hardly fuel enough to heat that 
meager meal while across the street the school yard was 
full of coal. Twenty soldiers, accoutered for combat, 
and barbed wire defenses made certain that not a shovel 
full of that coal was used to ease the agony of these 
helpless ones. I met a middle-aged woman of culture 
and position. Said she, “We pray daily that our parents 
may die soon. The old people don’t die soon enough.” 
This is the disturbing thought that harasses me. How 
much of the guilt for an order of life in which age 
is not respected and childhood unsafe rests on me? 
How much of that guilt am I prepared to assume? 
Until I bend my back to that load of guilt have I any 
reasonable hope for the morrow? 

‘“Sanctify yourselves for to-morrow Jehovah will 
work wonders among you.’ We who are out on the 
firing line, as it were, wonder as we look toward the 
universities. We long to see a rising tide of enthusiasm, 
‘intolerant alike of remedial injustice and the plausible 


[154] 


A NEW APOSTOLATE 


platitudes of the cynic. We wonder and take courage. 
It is not the way of youth to flee a task because it is 
difficult, to turn the back on the morrow because it calls 
for heroism. From “the countless springs of silent 
good” in the heart of youth will yet come a rising flood 
of waters of refreshing to give new life to our droop- 
ing ideals, new vigor to our parched hopes. 


[155] 


XII 
A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 
I 


AE leadership has broken down, political, economic, 
religious. Our religious life is no more confused 
than our political and economic life. 

It is, indeed, a pretty compliment to religious lead- 
ership to be so greatly concerned about it. Such con- 
cern is tacit acknowledgment of the real worth of re- 
ligion in social reconstruction. It may well be true 
that “religion is the only factor capable of acting rap- 
idly upon the character of a people,” in the words of Le 
Bon. Wherefore it becomes exceedingly urgent that 
our deficiencies in religious leadership be rectified. 

To criticize the church and its leadership is a privilege 
never neglected or long unexercised. Mere criticism is 
gratuitous. It is very liable to lead to abuse. More- 
over, as Glover has pointed out, “the church as a living 
thing has always had unsuspected powers of readjust- 
ment without losing its life.” It is always setting at 
naught its critics just when their bitterest charges seem 
most true. “Sire,” said Theodore de Béze to the 
King of Navarre, “it belongs in truth to the Church of 
God, in the name of which I speak, to receive blows 
and not to give them; but it will please your Majesty to 

[156] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many 
hammers.” 

My purpose in these pages is to point out at least 
two notable reasons for our present deficiency in lead- 
ership. These reasons are both cause and effect. They 
of themselves suggest certain constructive lines of 
amendment or renewal of effective leadership. 

We suffer chiefly not from bad leadership, but small 
leadership—tleadership not vicious, but impotent. The 
personal character and, frequently, administrative 
capability of the leaders are above reproach; but the 
leaders conceive their positions diminutively. They 
make of their opportunities mere fulfillment of routine 
duties. If it is not an actual case of “blind leaders of 
the blind,” it certainly is producing the same result. 
We are in the ditch. 

Even so there is something sinister about the popu- 
lar clamor for adequate religious leadership. It is the 
cry of fear for social protection rather than the out- 
burst of passion for social regeneration. Men are dis- 
traught. Customs long held sacred are under suspicion. 
Certain privileges and so-called “rights” are being 
closely scrutinized and menacingly questioned. In the 
resultant general alarm disturbed and uneasy persons 
cry unto the church for help. That their cry is in tones 
of bitter criticism is a bit of humor that escapes them. 
The liberal in the church is rather enjoying the situation 
—enjoying it in the sardonic manner of a Bernard 
Shaw. In other words, it is pathetically true that, in the 
judgment of many, “the church is the Tory party at 
prayer.” What they want is not a strong church, but a 


[157] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


strong Tory party; hence much clamor for adequate re- 
ligious leadership. Who but the church can effectively 
preach the immorality of change and the inviolability of 
tradition ? 

Old Anthony Collins, the Essex deist and free-think- 
er Sir Leslie Stephen wrote about, spread considerable 
confusion among church leaders and followers of his 
day by his incisive attacks on church teaching. When 
he was taken to task by his deist friends because he 
compelled his servants to attend church regularly, his 
defense was, “I do it that they may neither rob nor 
murder me.”’ Many will recognize his type to-day. 

These pages are particularly concerned with the more 
serious and vital phase of the matter. Why is religious 
leadership so ineffective as a force for social rebuild- 
ing? We want not a group of leaders who can teach 
us all to sing in unison, “as it was in the beginning, 
is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen,” 
but a group who can point out such changes as ought 
be effected in social organization. It is not a leadership 
that can preach with power and persuasion the im- 
morality of change, but a leadership that can with 
statesmanlike foresight and prophetic insight take us 
through “change and decay” that we want. Why 
haven’t we such leadership? What is the matter with 
our present religious leadership? 


II 


We are fallen upon evil times. There is a famine of 
prophets, not a Jonah in all this wide land whom we 


[158] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


care to cast overboard; not a man among us gifted with 
the insight of a Jeremiah or an Isaiah, and thereby en- 
abled to preach a message of doom, the prophet’s in- 
variable credential. Nay, let one attempt such a mes- 
sage, and with one accord we all charge against him 
“cynicism, the greatest of all sins.’ Paradoxical as it 
may seem, a society may well lose all hope when it 
knows no preachers of doom in it. Society progresses 
exactly in proportion to the number of prophetic 
heretics it has. 

Why have we no prophets? There are numerous 
minor reasons. Our leaders, accepted and recognized 
as such, are usually men in official positions. Discre- 
tion and tact are requisite to successful administration. 
That at once precludes the development of prophetic 
powers. When occasionally a prophet does speak forth 
from some pulpit, apologies are soon made to the 
wealthy parties most interested, and the lone preacher 
is neutralized. 

But there is an important historic reason why we 
have no prophets. The history of the origin of the 
Christian sermon, a very thorough account of which 
is to be had in “The Influence of Greek Ideas and 
Usages upon the Christian Church,” by Dr. Edwin 
Hatch, is instructive. In the primitive church preach- 
ing was unknown. Instead of the preacher, the church 
had the prophet. His function was not that of pre- 
diction, but of spontaneous utterance. ‘He preached 
because he could not help it, because there was a divine 
breath breathing within him which must needs find 


[159] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


utterance.”’ It is in this sense only that the prophets 
of the early church were preachers. 

Inevitably, Christianity made contacts with the Greek 
world. In the process of interpenetration that fol- 
lowed, Christianity both gave and took. One of the 
things it gave up was “prophesying”’; one of the things 
it took from the Greek world was that which became the 
Christian sermon. 

There was in the Greek world that Christianity 
entered a species of public lecturers known as sophists. 
The subjects of these sophists were usually morality or 
theology. They preached what we would call “ser- 
mons.” Robed in a special gown, seated on an elevated 
professorial chair, before an audience called either by 
personal invitation of the lecturer or by regular en- 
rollment, the sophist would discourse in the most re- 
fined rhetorical forms on these vital themes. His dis- 
courses were frequently interrupted by applause or by 
shouts of “Bravo!” “Wonderful!” “Divine!” 

The sophist made both money and reputation out of 
his trade; frequently he was appointed to lofty posi- 
tions in the state; sometimes he lived at the public ex- 
pense. While among the Christians of that period 
“sophist” was always a word of scorn, nevertheless the 
influence of sophism upon Christianity was very con- 
siderable. Spontaneity of utterance in the primitive 
church, prophetic utterance, one might say, died almost 
entirely during the second century. More accurately it 
was crushed by the official groups of leaders in the 
church. Such advocates of spontaneity of utterance 
as survived in Asia Minor, the Montanists, were 


[160] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


quickly charged with heresy and properly condemned. 
To this very day Tertullian is regarded with grave sus- 
picion by many because he shared the Montanists’ view. 

By the fourth century spontaneous utterance was 
unknown and the Christian sermon, much as we know 
it, was the order of the day. The sermon was a direct 
result of Greek contact with Christianity. Whether 
Christian preachers became enamored of wealth, such 
as sophists accumulated readily, or of high position, 
which was always accorded the more able orators,—one 
case is on record of a sophist so influential that he 
could turn the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who had come 
as a guest unexpectedly when the sophist was absent, 
out of doors at midnight with impunity,—or whether 
in unconscious imitation they fell into sophist ways, 


one cannot at this late date say with certainty. All 
these motives may have had some influence in accom- 


plishing the change. The fact is that the form and con- 
tent of the Christian message were changed, and re- 
main changed to this day. The prophet’s habit of 
spontaneous utterance gave way to the orator’s habit 
of polished discourse, adorned with the finest phrases 
selected from the abundant literature of myth, fable, 
and classic lore. With the change in habit came a 
change in spirit and purpose. ‘“‘The voice of the 
prophet had ceased; the voice of the preacher had be- 
gun.” 

The preacher was usually trained in the rhetorical 
methods of the day. Chrysostom, for instance, was 
trained under the well-known Libanius, leading soph- 
ist orator of his day, who on his death-bed said of 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


him that he would have been his worthiest successor 
““f the Christians had not stolen him.” 

A description of a fourth-century preacher by Chrys- 
ostom, the leading light of that century, is instructive: 
“There are many preachers who make long sermons: 
if they are well applauded, they are as glad as if they had 
obtained a kingdom; if they bring their sermon to an 
end in silence, their despondency is worse, I may al- 
most say, than hell. It is this that ruins churches, that 
you do not seek to hear sermons that touch the heart, 
but sermons that will delight your ears with their in- 
tonations and the structure of their phrases, just as if 
you were listening to singers and lute-players, And 
we preachers humor your fancies, instead of trying to 
crush them. We act like a father who gives a sick 
child a cake or an ice, or something else that is merely 
nice to eat—just because he asks for it; and takes no 
pains to give him what is good for him; and then when 
the doctors blame him says, ‘I could not bear to hear 
my child cry’... That is what we do when we 
elaborate beautiful sentences, fine combinations and 
harmonies, to please and not to profit, to be admired and 
not to instruct, to delight and not to touch you, to go 
away with your applause in our ears, and not to better 
your conduct. Believe me, I am not speaking at ran- 
dom: when you applaud me as I speak, I feel at the 
moment as it is natural for a man to feel. I will make 
a clean breast of it. Why should I not? I am de- 
lighted and overjoyed. And then when I go home and 
reflect that the people who have been applauding me 
have received no benefit, and indeed that whatever 

[162] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


benefit they might have had has been killed by the ap- 
plause and praises, I am sore at heart, and I lament and 
fall to tears, and I feel as though I had spoken alto- 
gether in vain, and I say to myself, what is the good of 
all your labors, seeing that your hearers don’t want to 
reap any fruit out of all that you say? And I have 
often thought of laying down a rule absolutely prohibit- 
ing all applause, and urging you to listen in silence.” 
Tradition has it that tumultous applause followed the 
delivery of this particular sermon. 

“Philosophy died, because for all but a small minority 
it ceased to be real. It passed from the sphere of 
thought and conduct to that of exposition ‘and litera- 
ture. Its preachers preached, not because they were 
bursting with truths which could not help finding ex- 
pression, but because they were masters of fine phrases 
and lived in an age in which fine phrases had a value. 
It died, in short, because it had become sophistry.” 

Rhetoric thus made philosophy unreal. Similarly, 
what rhetoric in the Greek world did to philosophy, the 
adoption of it in the Christian world eventually wrought 
upon Christianity, in that it destroyed the religious 
reality of the prophet’s message. ‘So it has been with 
Christianity. It came into the world in the simple dress 
of a Prophet of Righteousness. It won that world by 
the stern reality of its life, by the subtle bonds of its 
brotherhood, by its message of consolation and of hope. 
Around it thronged the race of eloquent talkers who 
persuaded it to change its dress and to assimilate its 
language to their own. It seemed thereby to win a 
speedier and completer victory. But it purchased con- 


£163] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


quest at the price of reality. With that its progress 
stopped. There has been an element of sophistry in 
it ever since; and so far as in any age that element has 
been dominant, so far has the progress of Christianity 
been arrested. Its progress is arrested now, because 
many of its preachers live in an unreal world. The 
truths they set forth are truths of utterance rather than 
truths of their lives. But if Christianity is to be again 
the power that it was in its earliest ages, it must re- 
nounce its costly purchase. A class of rhetorical chem- 
ists would be thought of only to be ridiculed: a class 
of rhetorical religionists is only less anomalous because 
we are accustomed to it. The hope of Christianity is 
that the class which was artificially created may ulti- 
mately disappear, and that the sophistical element in 
Christian preaching will melt, as a transient mist, be- 
fore the preaching of the prophets of the ages to come, 
who, like the prophets of the ages that are long gone 
by, will speak only ‘“‘as the Spirit gives them utterance.” 

These sentences by Dr. Hatch are solemnly prophetic. 
They lay bare unwittingly the vital defect of religious 
leadership—a defect not of organization, but of pulpit 
experience and utterance. The Christian pulpit lives 
largely in a realm of unreality or small realities. How 
can the great mass of Christian people move to the 
achievement of dominant realities? 

The same century that gave mankind the “modern” 
sermon fastened upon us the “modern” creed. Many 
preachers feel, a few say openly, that reality must re- 
main foreign to the pulpit message so long as preachers 
must assume a creed that knows nothing of the work 


[164] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


of Jesus, but knows only his metaphysical status, which 
does not concern the modern man. The very complaint 
ought to fill us with shame. If we need a battle-cry, 
let us have one that can and will rally the conscience of 
Christendom. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain 
voice, who shall prepare himself for war?’ If our 
present creeds ignore the social aims of the gospel, let 
us have creeds that proclaim those aims. Why must 
we, like George Eliot, be forever “influenced by minds 
inferior to our own’’? Half indignantly, Glover asks, 
“But what were the credentials of the bishops to war- 
rant them in settling the Christian Faith?” 

Our pulpit masters and creed-mongers need a bap- 
tism of prophetic unction. This is the chief deficiency 
of religious leadership. 

The need brings us forthwith face to face with the 
second major defect of religious leadership—the con- 
spiracy against youth, the widespread and prevailing 
conspiracy against youth. 


It 


Glance at the faces and figures of our leaders and 
see if you can detect any signs of youthfulness. Ata 
recent convention of a certain great and notable re- 
ligious organization, notable for its service to young 
men in years past, in fact notable in that it is a young 
men’s organization,—it so proclaims itself and is so 
chartered,—there was on the platform at any given 
moment not a single man who seemed younger than 
forty. In no sense was youth impressed upon one. 


[165] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


No young men made committee reports, no young men 
were elected to office, no young men spoke from the 
floor. 

Age is no crime. Nicodemus was an old man, hon- 
ored and respected by his fellows, “‘a teacher in Israel.” 
Jesus did not condemn him. He was indeed very 
patient with him. Yet he “understood not these 
things.’”’ When Jesus sought understanding minds, he 
sought youth. What reliance could he place upon a 
man coming by night, courteous, curious, but obtuse? - 
Isn’t it like putting “new wine into old skins?” 

It is contrary to nature to expect Nicodemus to ac- 
complish the work of Paul, for instance. Jesus did 
not expect it. We note no impression of disappoint- 
ment in Jesus when the aged leader left him. It was 
as it must be according to nature. Ross assures us: 
“In general it is young men who provide the logic, de- 
cision and enthusiasm necessary to relieve society of 
the crushing burden that each generation seeks to roll 
upon the shoulders of the next. The Greeks were right 
in accepting Hesiod’s maxim ‘work for youth, counsel 
for maturity, prayers for old age—The domination 
of graybeards is equivalent to a fatty degeneration of 
the social brain.” 

There is unanimous agreement that the work done by 
the council of Niczea was well done. This great council 
came at a critical time in the history of our religion. 
There is, unfortunately perhaps, genuine satisfaction 
to this very day with the results achieved. Wherefore, 
I conclude that the leadership was sound and far-see- 
ing; there is no doubt that it was courageous. Yet the 

[166] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


great figure that dominated that assembly, Athanasius, 
is supposed to have been in the neighborhood of thirty 
years of age. 

When the rigid shell of medievalism began to crack 
and the germinating life within to assert itself, the 
voice of leadership once more was the voice of youth. 
Luther, on the day when he nailed the theses on the 
church door at Wittenberg, was only thirty-four. All 
his great work was done before he was forty. Carlyle 
has called the Diet of Worms of 1521 “the greatest mo- 
ment in modern history.” The dominating figure, the 
great soul through which eternity spoke to time, was 
Luther, a monk of thirty-eight. 

Next to the Reformation of Luther, the greatest 
movement in modern religious life was the Evangelical 
Revival led by John Wesley. Among English-speaking 
peoples this movement has had more widespread 
influence than any other in our history. Coming 
when it did, at a time when even Bishop Butler had 
insisted that the church was dead and all that remained 
was to give it a decent burial, the Wesleyan Revival 
wrought a complete social regeneration. Lecky as- 
sures us that one thing only saved England from the 
horrors of a revolution similar to the French Revolu- 
tion. Social conditions were similar. The elements 
that caused the French Revolution were largely present 
in English social life. But John Wesley’s heart had 
been warmed in Aldersgate meeting in 1738. From 
that heart-warming came the passion that purified 
English social life. The leader of the movement was 
a young man of thirty-six. 


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THE WAY TO THE BEST 


Or what shall one say of the Pilgrim movement? 
“Pilgrim Fathers” we call them, strangely. Of the one 
hundred and two persons who shipped in the Mayflower 
thirty-nine were under twenty-one years of age. 
Bradford, the “‘greatheart” of the group, was exactly 
thirty-one; Winslow was twenty-five; Standish was 
thirty-six; Alden was twenty-one. Only two of the 
entire group were over fifty years of age, and only nine 
over forty. Veritably, this was an adventure of youth. 

Quiet rebellion possesses the hearts of thousands of 
young men both in pulpit and pew throughout our land. 
I make this assertion on the basis of the known attitude 
of scores of my own friends and acquaintances. No 
one feels more, keenly the inadequacy of our religious 
leadership than the youth of our land. Our leader- 
ship is not despised or held in contempt. The valiant 
men who in their days of youth wrought boldly and 
courageously, but who have since aged in service, 
though unfortunately they are still officially the lead- 
ers, are held in the greatest respect and reverence by 
youth. That is not the point. The prophets such as 
we have, Rauschenbusch, Gladden, Williams and others 
have thrilled the hearts of great numbers of young 
men and women. To many has been imparted social 
vision, without which “people perish.” A deep yearn- 
ing for daring attempts in the gospel program for so- 
cial life grips youth, but the conspiracy against youth 
has prevented this yearning from becoming articulate 
and thereby becoming effective. 

That the situation is similar in England was brought 
home to me recently. While discussing a certain dis- 

[168] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


tinguished and daring leader in the Church of England 
with a young priest of that church, he said: 

“You know, most of us young fellows agree with 
, but we can’t say so just yet. The Church of 
England is too ‘fixy.’ ” 

Throughout the church of Jesus Christ—the church, 
that is, of a young leader—to-day there prevails too 
much of the sinister spirit Kipling observed among the 
incompetent English generals in the Boer War. He 
puts into their mouths these words, so applicable to 
much religious leadership: 





“The Lamp of our Youth will be utterly out; but we shall 
subsist on the smell of it, 

And whatever we do, we shall fold our hands and suck 
our gums and think well of it. 

Yes, we shall be perfectly pleased with our work, and 
that is the perfectest Hell of it.” 


There are young Isaiahs a-plenty who at twenty-two 
have seen “the Lord, sitting upon a throne, high and 
lifted up.” It is a vision of possibilities rather than of 
actualities. Now that Uzziah, the aged king, is dead,— 
for it was “in the year that King Uzziah died’ that 
young Isaiah saw the Lord,—some progress in social 
justice can be made. Hearts are pulsating with passion 
to lift up the throne of the Lord in the midst of modern 
social life. Greatly impatient, these young Isaiahs wait 
and wait and wait for their experienced leaders to lead 
them into the fray. Those same leaders 


“Abide until the battle is won ere they amble into the fray.” 


And there you have the situation. Reverence for age 
and respect for “service records” restrain youth, and 


[169] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


meanwhile the church ambles along in an amusing and 
harmless way—so harmless, in fact, that some one has 
suggested that the unrighteous profiteer and the in- 
iquitous politician are more afraid of Ramsay Mac- 
Donald or Eugene Debs than they are of the whole 
church of Jesus Christ! Time was when a Peter ora 
Paul in prison struck terror in the hearts of the official 
groups! 

The sociologist is quite certain that ‘new movements 
are born in young minds, and that lack of experience 
enables youth eternally to recall civilization to sound 
bases.” History has a stubborn way of insisting upon 
the validity of this generalization. Not in the life of 
organized religion alone is this a fact, but in the life 
of states as well. The eleven men who were destined to 
become the leaders of the French Revolution averaged, 
at its inception, thirty-four years of age. The Ameri- 
can Constitution, ‘‘the grandest work of the hand of 
man,’ was fathered by a mere lad, James Madison, 
aged thirty-six, while at least one of his confreres was 
an unbearded youth of twenty-one, Jonathan Dayton of 
New Jersey. Why should the church resist this social 
law? 


IV 


Three alternatives are before us if we would redeem 
our religious leadership. Each one is beset with great 
difficulties. The situation is not without hope, however. 

The first alternative is to provide a place for youth 
in the positions of leadership. That this will be ever 


[170] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


done, is most unlikely. Christian councils from Nicea 
onward have been “filled with officials and old men.” 
They present a solid wall of opposition to the ardor 
of youth. To break through to positions of leadership 
would require a skill in ecclesiastical politics youth has 
not the patience to acquire. 

The second alternative is to substitute extra-ecclesi- 
astical leadership in religion for our present ecclesias- 
tical leadership. That is to say, let official church lead- 
ers worry along in their harmless way while we look to 
sociologists, biologists, editors, poets, professors, and 
others to lead us in the things of the spirit. It may be 
easier to develop a new race of leaders from such 
groups than to restore church leadership to its place 
of power. 

Extra-ecclesiastical leadership in religion would 
seem to create an anomalous situation. Such a situation 
is not unknown to history. To wield a power denied 
him in the pulpit Emerson had to resort to the lecture 
platform and the essayist’s study. His real leadership 
was extra-ecclesiastical. His was the voice, the “clear 
and pure voice,” which brought a new, moving, and 
unforgettable strain to the Oxford of Matthew Arnold’s 
youth. It was the voice of certainty. Exactly such a 
voice we are eager to hear to-day. 

In utter despair of the priesthood and the church 
and in agony of soul, Whittier wrote his great hymns, 
which became flaming beacons to rally the spiritual and 
moral forces of the land. A poet again stepped in and 
led where the appointed leader was wanting. That 
Whittier’s leadership was effective is proved by the 


[171] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


fact that Dr. Crandall, a Washington physician, 
languished in prison until he contracted a fatal illness 
under sentence for the misdemeanor of reading a bor- 
rowed copy of Whittier’s pamphlet, “Justice and Ex- 
pediency.”’ 

The supremacy of extra-ecclesiastical leadership is 
not a comforting thought to the churchman. Social 
necessity is no respecter of tradition, however. More- 
over, for a decade or more the tendency of ardent men 
has been to forsake the church and its ministry for 
positions with social agencies where they can, as they 
say, more easily and wholly fulfill Christ’s mission of 
service to humanity. It may well be that out of that 
group of men will come a new race of leaders. 

The third alternative is to develop within the church, 
among the young men of it, groups of prophetic spirits, 
such as Wesley’s Holy Club at Oxford. From such 
groups we might reasonably expect another Wesley. 

It is not beyond the reach of the imagination to 
suppose that, if we could develop within the church a 
“preaching order’? made up of men who are relieved of 
the burden of organization and routine and are ex- 
pected to furnish intelligent, daring, consecrated lead- 
ership according to the Gospel of Jesus, such a “preach- 
ing order” might well become a new race of prophets 
who, like the prophets of the primitive church, 
preached by “spontaneous utterance.” 

It may seem rash to risk our social well-being to a 
leadership of “‘spontaneous utterance.” The psycholo- 
gist has spoiled our respect for such utterance. It is 
well to bear in mind, therefore, that Jesus was just 


[172] 


A FAMINE OF PROPHETS 


that sort of prophet and leader. That, moreover, as 
Hastings Rashdall has pointed out, “‘the greatest moral 
teachers of mankind have not usually been speculative 
philosophers. That was eminently true with Jesus 
Christ and his first disciples. An instinct of reverence 
is apt to blind us to the immense amount of real, hard 
thinking which was implied in the religious and moral 
teaching of Jesus. The greatness, the originality, of 
Jesus was intellectual as well as moral. It came to him 
by way of intuition.” Prophetic preaching does not im- 
ply strange visions, ecstasies, tongues, etc. It does im- 
ply straight, hard thinking, in terms of reality, upon the 
vexing issues of our present social life. “Spontaneous 
utterance” might well be described as giving expression 
to the deepest convictions of the soul, arrived at after 
penetrating study of the Gospel of Jesus, combined with 
a readiness to bear the full consequence of the proclama- 
tion of the complete Gospel. 

Had we a “preaching order’ of neo-prophets now, 
an order of men (and why not women, too?) whose sole 
social function would be to present persistently the gos- 
pel teaching concerning war and international relations, 
concerning wages, housing, and industrial relations, 
concerning social, creedal, sexual relations, we would 
no doubt witness the reénactment of certain well-known 
scenes of history, such scenes as the strangling of Sa- 
vonarola for criticizing the conduct of Pope Alexander 
VI or the burning of Huss for suggesting the revision 
of the creeds of the church. We are in a mood of re- 
action, a mood for betraying prophets, but 


[173] 


THE WAY TO THE BEST 


“Men betrayed are mighty and great are the wrongfully 
dead.” 


One such betrayal, a single social martyrdom of a single 
person who was “persecuted for righteousness’ sake,”’ 
who suffered for “my sake and the gospel’s,”’ would do 
more to redeem religious leadership from its state of 
pointlessness—that is, of futility—than all the wit and 
wisdom contributed by all the critics. Calvary precedes 
resurrection. 


THE END 


{174] 








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